


may nothing but death do us part

by The_angel_that_fell



Category: Resident Evil, Resident Evil (Movieverse)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Fluff, Zombies, this is gay
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-10
Updated: 2019-04-06
Packaged: 2019-05-04 20:58:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 23,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14601585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_angel_that_fell/pseuds/The_angel_that_fell
Summary: When Rain wakes up, she thinks she's dead.There's no blood or sweat on her - her blood had filled her mouth and her sweat had coated her skin, she remembers that much, and winces.In which Rain walks out into Raccoon City to find a place devastated by the apocalypse that has been raging for ten years. Confused, lonely, and only vaguely aware of the true depth of Umbrella's meddling, she must navigate across this new world to find both Alice and the answers she needs.





	1. Chapter 1

When Rain wakes up, she thinks she's dead.

There's no blood or sweat on her - her blood had filled her mouth and her sweat had coated her skin, she remembers that much, and winces. She pulls herself into a half-sitting position, or tries to. She's connected to the white operating table beneath her by thin, clear tubes that run into her hand, her side, her head. Where the fuck is she?

Rain tugs on the tube in her hand and it slides out, leaving a stinging feeling behind. She rubs at it and reaches for the wires in the side of her head. That hurts more, and she almost screams as she wrenches them out and throws them across the room. The hit the opposite wall, which is as white and gleaming and sterile as the floor and table and ceiling, and slide down.

She can remember... the Hive. The monsters. The train back to the surface, letting them go, letting them escape even as the virus killed her. She recalls the agony of the virus and burning fever, and then nothing. No, that's not right.

She chases the memory as she swings her legs over the table and tests them. She's fine to stand, which is fortunate because her head does  _not_ agree with being upright. It's like she's very badly hungover, minus the night of fun before.

Rain remembers then, and almost sits back down.

She was dead, but she moved, she could feel it in her muscles. She has no memory of what came after the blackness, but she knows instinctively the T-virus must have brought her back. Alice had promised to kill her. She would have killed her. She's seen Alice fight - one more undead wouldn't have bothered her.

Unless she didn't even see Rain coming. Unless the other monster - the Licker, somebody had called it - had got her and Matt first. The thought alone made her grit her teeth and rip out the remaining tubes out her side, which had been left exposed by the... well, it felt like a fucking napkin, tied at top and bottom. She was going to kill whoever put her in this.

Flexing her fingers, she walked unsteadily over to the door, and typed in her code as an Umbrella operative. Unsurprisingly, it beeped red.

She sighed and went to get a syringe to pick the lock with. 

 

Once Rain was through the door, she noticed the splashes of blood on the corridor walls, browned with age. A long scratch marred the Umbrella logo on the floor and she knelt, ran a finger over it. It was definitely not made by human nails. Shuddering reflexively at the thought of the Licker's claws, she stood and surveyed her surroundings. It was certainly an Umbrella facility, that much was obvious. Maybe it was a recreation? But why bother testing her?

God, she needed to hit something. 

She limped down the hallway unsteadily, very aware of how vulnerable she was. If anything appeared right now, from the Licker to an ordinary operative, she'd have a hard time fighting them off. Her clothes were probably already destroyed, which meant she needed to find some sort of body armour - preferably bite-proof, just in case.

 

She finds a lab room after a few minutes, and Rain grins when she sees the weapons stacked along the walls.

"Hell, yeah."

The smile fades when she hears a distinctive moan. Swiping a pistol at random from the wall, she clicks a round into it and approaches a white table with scattered papers. It rears up unexpectedly, taking Rain by surprise, and she fires at the chest automatically. It doesn't even stagger back.

 _Headshot,_ she remembers. 

The second shot tears through its brain and drops it. She fires one more time to be sure, then checks over the rest of the lab before returning to the body to ensure there's no nasty surprises waiting. it's wearing standard security-issue, a size too big, but she eases off the black jacket anyway. It affords more protection than the flimsy cloth. She's feeling in the pockets when a shuffling noise alert her, just in time. 

A bullet between the eyes drops it as it bears down on her and it hits the floor hard.

The noise is probably drawing them in, she realises. She needs to clear out before everything in the vicinity comes for her. 

Rain studies the second body. Civilian clothes, black jeans, black boots and a red T-shirt with minimum bloodstains. It would do for now.

She shucks off the light bit of cloth and dresses in the corpse's clothes. They are a better size, and she grabs the belt off the security guard. Then she pauses, considers it. The sleeves on the jacket are too big for her, but she can work with it. She grabs a knife off the wall, cuts them off at the shoulders, and shrugs it on. Perfect.

She grabs a rifle, sniper issue, and slings it on her back. She considers bringing a shotgun, but it's fucking heavy to lug around, so she abandons it in favour of the same weapon she used in the Hive. Twin pistols slot into her belt and she grabs a belt of ammunition, slings it over her shoulders. Extra clips go into the boots, and Rain swipes a pair of fighting knives from a shelf and shoves them into the belt, almost turns away, then remembers to check for silencers. That's better. She feels more secure now, with the weapons strapped on her.

She strides out the lab and comes face-to-face with another monster, drops it with a knife through the eye. She yanks out the blade and wipes it on the corpse.

She needs to find Alice.

 

The street is devastated.

Cars are rusted, rotting shells, most with only their frame left intact. Some of the buildings have crumbled and many show their metallic skeletons in places, the glass shattered and wood decaying.

How fucking long was she out for? This is long-term destruction, unchecked ageing. She thinks back to the things she took down, skin stretched tight across their bones, their wounds dry and crusting. They are old corpses, long dead. A week? Month? Year?

Gritting her teeth, Rain heads out into the road. And starts walking.

 

They come slowly at first, in ones and twos. Then more. Within half an hour, Rain is aware the street is no longer a viable option. Maybe they can scent her, or maybe they are drawn automatically to her, but after bringing down a group of six, and spotting another lot at the end of an alleyway, she aims for a residential area.

She picks a house at random and steps inside. The front door's swinging on its hinges, so she takes the liberty of shutting it behind her and drags a coffee table over to keep it shut. One undead woman lunges from the kitchen and Rain takes it down. Another, a man, probably her husband, emerges from under the stairs. She stabs him, not wanting to waste any more ammo than she already has, and drags herself upstairs. 

Rain calls out first, and when there's no response kicks the doors open one by one. Bathroom. Bedroom. Kid's bedroom with a big closet and pink bed. She turns to go, and there's a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye.

"Hey," Rain says, hoping to God it isn't a kid, she's awful with kids, and nudges the door back open, props it with her rifle. "Hey," she says again, for lack of anything else to say, and then the doors to the closet fly open and a small figure launches itself at Rain. The impact takes the breath out of her, knocks her down, and the kid's on her.

"Stop it!" Rain snarls, and then the kid looks up and makes eye contact, and her heart drops. "Shit," she mutters. Her - it was a girl, once - mouth is stained with blood and there's a chunk missing from her left cheek. _"Shit."_ She pushes it away, and it hits the corner of the bedpost and rebounds, growling-

And Rain shoots her with the pistol. The kid drops.

"Shit," Rain says again for good measure, breathing heavily. Having kiddie undead wandering around shouldn't really come as a surprise, but it's still creepy as fuck.

She picks her rifle up and slings it over her back, then heads for the bathroom. No running water, not even the cold tap, so she wanders back downstairs. There's already one monster at the front door. She shoves a couple of chairs on top of the coffee table and leaves it.

In the kitchen, a swarm of flies erupt from the cupboard once she opens the door. Once she's done waving the buzzing cloud away, she sees a load of unappetising half-rotten food, and a couple of tins. She pulls them out. Fruit of some sort in one, soup in the other. It'll do for lunch.

 

She eats while searching the house. A semi-automatic pistol, a few extra rounds, more tinned food, a map, a coil of rope that she opts to leave. A torch, which she ties to a bit of string and secures to her belt. By this time the monsters are banging at the door and making considerable progress, so Rain straps a watch that was on one of the corpses to her own wrist and climbs out one of the upstairs windows.

She's scaling the fence in the back garden when she realises that she has no idea where she's headed. This city could be anywhere; with no radio (if anyone is broadcasting these days) her chances of finding Alice are about as slim as her chances of survival. Rain drops down the other side of the fence and pulls out the map. 

It's a map of the US. On it, in thick red marker, a single route is mapped out, and Rain studies the destination. Alaska. Then she follows it all the way back down to its source and stares at the city. Racoon City. She shouldn't be surprised and she isn't, not really. of course she's here, at the end of everything. Of course she was kept in the Umbrella facility here. Of course. Of course.

She folds the map back up, and heads in the direction of the exit to the city. She was going to survive. And then she was going to find Alice. And figure out why she was alive.

Rain Ocampo lifted her head, and smiled a predator's smile. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> leave reviews and/or suggestions please!


	2. Chapter 2

"Fucking hell."

Rain's voice doesn't carry far, and besides, there are no infected this high up. No, she's all alone, standing at the top of a desecrated skyscraper. The roof she's on is just high enough to give her a view out over the land, and she struggles to comprehend the sheer scale of the damage. She'd hoped maybe there'd be a wall she could climb over and return to civilisation or something, but the height hammers it home. 

The apocalypse has come, and wrecked the whole of civilisation with it. The undead aren't visible from where she stands, the wind tugging at stray strands of hair, although she can imagine them wandering mindlessly to the base of the building. They were probably already on the way up.

Rain turns away from the view of devastation, and jumps.

For a few moments she feels weightless, and then gravity comes back and slams her into concrete. She rolls, comes up on one knee, glances back across the divide between the buildings. Only a couple of metres, but an inch of error would have her bloody and broken on the ground far below. She shrugs. Still better than becoming a monster.

She hurries down the winding staircase, hopping over the missing steps, and hits the ground floor at a steady jog, grateful for Umbrella's extensive physical training. It's allowed her to mostly stay ahead of the things, kept her running on virtually no sleep since she awoke. It's been two days now, and she cleared the perimeter of Raccoon City the day before. She'd opted to cross just below the crumbling wreck of the bridge, which had been proved a stupid decision the moment a monster lunged at her with fucking _tentacles_ curling out its mouth.

She had hit the ground as it dived for her, and moved just fast enough to put a bullet in its mouth, but the sharp fangs on the end of those tentacles would probably give Rain nightmares if she ever slept again. 

A monster emerged from an empty doorway ahead of her and she throws one of her knives. It goes down with the handle sticking out its eye socket and Rain barely pauses to retrieve it, wiping the blade on her pants as she moves. That was a benefit to the apocalypse: plenty of victims for her target practice, and a good motivation for not missing.

She's watching the sky when the bar hits her.

 

"Reckon she's infected?"

"Shhh. She's coming round."

Rain stirs slowly, aware of a throbbing, aching pain in the back of her head. She blinks to clear the darkness from her eyes, and winces.

She's lying on a very cold floor, and there's tough rope digging into her wrists and ankles. Three people are watching her from the corners of the room. They look like they've been dragged through a thorny bush, with crazy, wiry hair and ripped clothes. All men, with tangled beards. She doesn't like the look in their eyes.

"Who the fuck are you?" Rain spits, knowing it won't help her, but damn pissed anyway that they had gotten her so easily.

"Shut up, bitch," one of the men hisses. He seems to be in charge, the other two deferring to him automatically.

"Seriously, let me out," she snaps. "I'm not one of them."

"Oh, I know," he leers. His tone tells her what she already guessed. There's a reason she's tied up.

"Touch me and I'll kill you," she growls. His leer grows into a predatory grin. "I'm going to murder you."

"You're gonna need to get free for that," one of the others says. Short. Brown hair. Dirt-streaked face. "Reckon we should let her free?"

"Hell no," the last one mutters. The leader steps forward and kicks her, hard. His foot connects with her ribs, and if she was standing she would have been bent over by the air whooshing from her lungs. Here, all she can do is gasp and glare at him.

"I'll start," he says, and wrenches her upright. Rain headbutts him as soon as he gets close, and he staggers back, wheezing, but the short one is there, and something metallic connects with her skull, knocks her down again. "You're going to pay for that!" the leader shouts, holding his bloody nose. "Tie her up!"

She's grabbed, dragged backwards, has her hands secured above her head to a nail that hangs from the wall. The leader moves into her space and grabs her chin, hard enough to bruise.

Rain doesn't let herself think as she brings her bound feet up and kicks him in the chest.

In one swift move, she slides the spare knife from her boot and saws through her feet, is raising it to work on her hands when she sees the short one coming for her. She lashes out, a kick to his solar plexus that has him bent over, and the blade slides through her bonds just as the last one sprints for her.

He stops dead in his tracks. The leader only starts screaming when he sees the knife buried in his eye, and he falls slowly, blood trickling out around the blade.

She's getting good at those shots.

She crosses to him and grabs the knife, and turns to the remaining two.

The short one is trying to hobble away subtly. She punches him in the head, hard, and he goes out like a light. And then she turns to the leader, who is swallowing and looks like he's wet himself. Rain jams the knife beneath his throat and he stops moving altogether.

"Where's your supplies?" she snaps. He almost gulps, thinks better of it.

"In- in the ventilation. There." He points.

Rain drags him over and kicks the grate out, then bends to check he was being honest. She catches a glimpse of a radio, a black sports bag, and the glint of metal before a slow moan sounds from the empty doorway.

She whirls, and the man takes the opportunity to push free. The knife nicks his arm, but he sprints away from her, backing into-

Into clawing hands, and a mouth that bites into his neck. Rain can't get a clear shot, not with the man in the way, and she's only got one knife. She makes a split-second decision and kneels, scoops out everything in the small tunnel, shoves it into the sports bag without even looking properly. There's a clatter as her weapons spill onto the floor, and she slings the rifle over her back, wraps the belt around her waist, shoves the knife back into her boot, slides free the twin pistols. One shot and the man stops screaming, one more and the monster falls on top of him. She grabs the bag, hauls it onto her shoulder, and runs.

 

She finally slows from a steady jog to a walk three hours later. The noise and screaming had attracted a lot of the things, and she had no intention of sticking around to find out if they were as formidable in a crowd as they seemed. 

She perches on an abandoned swing set left in somebody's front garden, and drops the bag on the floor before unzipping it. She hasn't stopped to look inside since she left the men behind, too on edge, but the adrenaline spike of fear has long since faded to a steady burn in her muscles.

The first thing she notices is the radio, a compact little thing. She glances over it, and decides to leave fiddling with it to afterwards. She isn't sure if anybody will be transmitting, anyway. She reaches back in and grabs a metal canister of water. That's a relief, she thinks, and gulps from it while she retrieves a variety of tins. There's another pistol, too, a semi-automatic with a couple of rounds, and a notebook. She leafs through it carelessly. It seems to be a scrapbook of some kind. Notes scribbled in an untidy hand, old pictures glued in. A small map of the Nevada desert, for some reason. She turns another page, and sees in blocky handwriting, numbers.  _The Arcadia_ is scrawled beneath them. She recognises the numbers. Frequencies. 

She turns the radio on and tunes it in.

"This is the Arcadia, broadcasting on the emergency frequency. There is no infection. We offer safety and security, food and shelter. Repeat, there is no infection." 

Rain freezes. A haven, free of infection in this war-torn world. She listens as the message is repeated, followed by a series of numbers. Coordinates. She pulls out the map, traces it down to the Alaskan coast. The line drawn on the map points way past it, almost to Vegas, and Rain wonders if the person that drew on this map heard the broadcast. She frowns. Their line ends up in a different location from hers. 

Maybe they just didn't know how to find coordinates. It bugs her anyway, and she turns the radio back on.

"-offering safety and security, food and shelter-"

How? How could they maintain a permanent settlement without being overrun by millions of undead? 

Unless they weren't maintaining a settlement. Unless they could only move on the coast because they were in a ship, which would explain the difference between the coordinates she has and the line already on the map. 

Another thought startles her. What if Alice is on the ship? Surely any survivor would have been running for the coast the moment the broadcast started, most being probably unprepared and underequipped when the things first began attacking. Rain thinks of her painful first encounter and the chunk it took out of her hand, and how chaotic things would have been if the virus swept the globe without warning. Clearly, civilisation had not been aware of the risk, or it would not now be lying in tatters around her. 

It was the kind of place Alice may well gravitate to: a chance for her to do good, to kill infected and keep survivors safe. Rain could imagine her there. 

She repacks the bag and tucks the map into one of her jacket pockets before setting off. This time, though, she has a specific purpose in mind, and surveys the streets methodically until she reaches a car that doesn't seem quite as wrecked as the others. She dumps her bag in the passenger seat and ducks under the steering wheel to hotwire it. Wires touch, spark, and the engine splutters to life. Rain sits back, satisfied, and spreads the map out over her lap, weighs it down with a pistol.

Driving is a relief after so many days of near-aimless wandering. Now she has a place to be, and a reason to be there, and she drives like it. She used to love the risk, and the danger is exponentially increased with the damaged roads and monsters staggering towards the noise.

Although Rain's careful not to damage the car, she grins as she revs the engine and picks up the pace. If she hadn't been recruited into Umbrella, she probably would have ended up racing cars for extra cash. She can't imagine herself as a civilian, though - she was the job, doing whatever Umbrella ordered unquestioningly. Maybe she should have pushed harder for ulterior motives, but... but she had her place, and was fine with it.

Until she wasn't.

She bites down on her lip, hard, and follows the sign to the highway. Umbrella must have caused the apocalypse, she tells herself. Umbrella had the tech. Umbrella had the control. Yet she can't help but feel she failed in some intrinsic way. Her team - her long-dead team - had opened up the Hive and in doing so had exposed the T-virus to the world.

A high-pitched screech interrupted her thoughts, and she glances up.

"Fucking hell," she says reflexively. In the sky above her is a biohazard.

A big one, too, with its long, spiked tail and beating wings. It reminds her of some winged insect, six legs curled out to strike.

She wrenches the wheel left and the car skids, veered onto a smaller road overgrown with yellow weeds. The creature follows, its heavy wingbeats echoing through the sky. Rain swears again as it closes in, dipping towards her, and accelerates. 

Making a split-second decision, she takes off her seatbelt and with one hand grabs her bag.

Three.

It's dipping lower again.

Two.

Light gleams off its oversized teeth as it opens its mouth.

_One._

Rain hits the brakes. The car screeches as it tries to grip, and she opens the door and hurls herself out.

Time slows. She hits the ground and rolls, the rough pavement tearing scratches into her skin, and gasps for breath as the world rights itself. The biohazard dives for the car, claws digging into the roof, and flaps. Rain doesn't dare get to her feet in case it attracts the thing's attention. She shuffles backwards, into the wall of a building behind her. The monster shrieks and the roof comes loose. It flaps up, trying to see where its prey has gone. Rain pulls herself to her feet and slowly, quietly, begins moving along the wall. She leaves the bag where it lays.

She can feel when it locks onto her.

It releases another ear-splitting scream and dives for her. She dodges, sees an empty window, jumps through, shattered glass fragments embedding themselves in her hands, and she knows it will hurt later, if she survives. She draws her twin pistols and backs away from the window.

She only realises she's aiming in the wrong direction when something crunches behind her.

She spins, back to the window, spots a monster shuffling towards her from the relative darkness of the building. She puts it down, and the biohazard lunges.

Rain hits the floor again as its head shoves through the gap and swings wildly, jaws snapping open and shut. She moves out of the range of the head and fires once, twice, three times. The bullets only enrage it, and it redoubles its effort. She can hear the wall beginning to groan and creak. She fires again, but it's angry now, angry enough to ignore the fateful creaking as it reaches for its prey.

The ceiling caves suddenly, dust and wood raining down. Rain covers her head with her arms, but it does little to protect against the smaller splinters. She bears the onslaught unmoving, barely breathing, waiting to see if the building itself will collapse and bury her.

When everything stills again, she risks looking up. The biohazard - if it's dead - is obscured by a choking cloud of ash and dust, so she heads out the door and back onto the street, where the rest of its body lies still and unmoving. She risks a step closer, kicks at a wing, grins in relief when it doesn't move, and circles the body carefully. She's never seen the like, inside Umbrella or out. It's almost undoubtedly a product of the T-virus, because nothing else could produce such a deadly opponent, but she can't even begin to guess at the original host.

Shaking her head, Rain goes to find her bag. Apart from a light layer of dust, it's undamaged, so she pulls it over her shoulder and looks around.

She needs somewhere safe to go for a few hours. Already in the distance there is the shuffling that precedes crowds of the undead, and she's not in any condition to deal with them. Her hands are cut and bleeding from the glass, and it feels as if her entire body is covered in splinters and dust. She looks around.

The only undamaged vehicle on this road is a motorcycle. Rain sighs. It'll be hell to ride, and she does need to clean and bind her hands, but she also needs to get out of town, preferably without being eaten alive.

 

Two hours later, Rain slumps against the wall of a gas station. The ride was agony, as she predicted, but she needed to get away, and this station, abandoned and miles from anything remotely interesting, would do for a few hours.

She searches it, finds two bottles of spirits, opens one and walks outside, to sit facing her bike and the few weeds. She takes a gulp. It tastes like motor fuel and burns, but she's relieved for the burning heat it spreads through her body.

Rain holds the neck of the bottle between her legs and bends over her hands. As she suspected, most of the glass is ridiculously fine, but she digs through anyway and pinches the largest pieces between her thumb and forefinger while she draws them out. Fresh blood trickles from her palms. She ignores it, works through her fingers until most of the glass is out, and there's only the finest pieces left. Whenever she moves her hands, she can feel the miniscule shards scraping deeper into her skin. Rain looks to the bottle and sighs. Now she has to deal with the worst part.

The alcohol hurts as it trickles over her hands, burns and burns and burns. She bites down hard on her lip to avoid making noise as it licks fire through her wounds, but it's cleansing and she would be in so much trouble if her cuts got infected, with no medicine anywhere. That's what she tells herself over and over as she resists the urge to wipe it away. She's fine. Nothing she can't handle.

Once her hands are relatively clean - or glass-free, at least - Rain goes back into the station and looks for spare strips of cloth. There's nothing in the main shop, so she finds the one locked door, probably leading out back, and kicks it open. 

The lock snaps free easily and Rain immediately regrets not checking it earlier, if it was so easy to escape. At least there's no infected. No, there's nothing except a shrivelled corpse on the floor, with tatters for clothes.

She looks at the rags and actually considers it for a moment before shaking her head. She's far more likely to get infected wounds from corpse clothes than the open air. She'll just have to be careful, she thinks, and pushes the door shut behind her. She can stay at the station for a few more hours, she knows, but afterwards she will have to brave the open roads again.

She has somewhere she needs to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> kudos are an author's paycheck :)


	3. Chapter 3

The next few days are gruelling.

Rain rides hard and fast, only stopping for supplies and gas. She notices, with a kick of unease, that most of the gas stations are drained already, which only increases her feeling of being outside normal time, as if suspended eternally in some hellscape. It's more than a little unnerving.

She reaches Los Angeles some time after the first week (she's stopped counting the days, what's the point?) and eases up, riding the bike with the water on her left and the city to her right. What truly unsettles her is the undead - or rather, the lack of them. In a city this size, it should be swarming with monsters. Yet there's nothing but the wind and the smell of smoke from the skyscrapers in the distance.

By midday, the mist that has been hovering low over the water burns away. Rain glances out to the horizon, does a double-take, and scrambles in her bag for a pair of binoculars she's picked up a while back. She brings them to her eyes, fiddles with the lenses, and slowly it comes into focus.

The  _Arcadia._ Parked nice and neat offshore only ten minutes out. She grins, swings off the bike, and leaves it to walk along the harbour wall. 

There's boats still moored, despite all this time. Some are flooded, oarless, flooded and oarless, or have some kind of obvious damage that make them unusable. A couple even have corpses in them, and one a jumble of bones. Soon enough, though, she finds a small dinghy-type vessel, red paint flaking slowly into the water, its motor apparently intact. She tosses her bag down into it and jumps down after it. She's never been great with motors - better than JD had always made out, God she misses him - but it only takes a few minutes before it's purring. She draws a knife, saws through the rope still tying it to its mooring point, and the boat takes off, nearly fast enough to unseat her. She grins. This, she cam deal with.

 

Ten minutes, like she estimated, and she's drawing close to the  _Arcadia._ It looks even larger up close.

"Hey!" she shouts up its smooth sides. "Anybody home?"

Evidently not.

She pulls the remainder of the mooring rope towards her and fashions a makeshift lasso, then throws it upwards. If they're not going to help her up, she can do it herself.

Two tosses is all it takes before it catches on something. Rain tugs briefly and shimmies up it, very aware of how old and rotted it is. Still, she makes it to the top and hops on deck.

Something is not right on this ship.

Her first clue that something is wrong is a small red plane, which apparently took a nosedive into the landing pad. It's still smoking when Rain circles it carefully, spots an old camcorder secured to the front. She pulls it loose and shoves it in her bag.

Her second clue is the unearthly, chilling silence. It's more than a little unnerving - a ship this size should be swarming with life, enough life that her calls for help should have been heard from her boat.

The third and final clue, which only adds to her growing sense that something is very, very wrong, is that the spaces where the lifeboats should rest are empty. That is what makes her fingers dance over her weapons. If anybody is here, whether that is AI or a biohazard or even a skeleton crew, she has to find them. 

Unable to shake her jumpiness, she heads for the nearest flight of stairs and descends, away from the eerie deck. Down and down the stairs go, leading to a single long corridor, ending in a white metal door. Umbrella's symbol is engraved in it, all six sections gleaming clean. That's strange as well - if nobody is here, why is everything so sterile and pure?

She presses her palm to the door and it slides open with a soft  _snick_ , revealing a huge white room. It looks totally empty except for one podium near the door, which bears a glowing screen. Confused, Rain picks it up and scrolls through it. There are headshots, names, medical histories.

Rain looks back over the sprawling blankness and taps a name at random. There's a click which has her hands shooting for her knives, and a podium rises up out of the floor not two metres from her feet. She frowns, paces closer, then recoils. There's a person in there in white clothes, face blank. Unconscious. She looks at the screen again.

 _James Smith,_ it reads.  _Engineer._

She clicks back, scrolls through the list more slowly this time, looking carefully.

_Doctor._

_Medical assistant._

_Maintenance._

It takes a moment for all the pieces to click together before she understands. This is the crew. The crew are beneath her, trapped in the floor. She wants to gag and scream because this is Umbrella unmistakeably, their kind of fucked-up hellish experiment. She replaces the screen like it's a volatile bomb, and surveys the room again. Empty, except for one door at the opposite end of it.

She approaches it, and it slides open automatically, revealing a massive room, even bigger than the last. There's trucks and helicopters on both sides, but Rain doesn't even spare them her glance. 

All her attention is focused on the three people who are walking down the centre of the aisle.

Her knives are in her hands already, and she's flying down a small set of steps, sprinting to them. Guns come up, but that's not what stops her.

What stops her is the way they look. The man on the left has a cocky grin, and the woman on the right has red hair, and they're dressed in survivors' clothes, ripped and bloodstained. They are not Umbrella, not biohazards. Not a threat.

And then her gaze slips to the woman in the centre and Rain stops dead a metre away from them. 

Alice just stares at her.

Not dead. Healthy. Alive.

Rain takes her in, the shorter hair and black clothes, and grins.

"So how about that kiss, then?" she asks. And it's an awful thing to say, especially when Alice is still looking at her, drinking her in, but she can't help herself.

"You know her?" the redhead says. Alice smiles at last.

"Rain, this is Chris and Claire Redfield. Chris, Claire, meet Rain Ocampo. We were together in the Hive."

"This is nice, but there's things for us to do," Chris says. "Survivors to free."

"Go ahead," Alice says. "I'll catch you up." They exchange dubious glances, but leave them alone.  


 

Alice finds them a small room. It's gleaming like the rest of the ship, but contains only a table and two chairs, Rain sits, lays her rifle out on the table, and begins disassembling it. She needs to make sure it's clean and functioning. She'll be in trouble if it jams.

"You were dead," Alice says. She's watching her with the same quiet intensity she used to have, back in the Hive. Rain shrugs, removes the bullets from the chamber.

"I suppose I was."

"No. You were  _dead._ And then you came back, and Matt shot you in the head. You were gone."

Rain sighs. and then she tells her whole story, all of it - waking up in the facility, travelling through Zombieland, arriving in Los Angeles. Alice just sits and listens. And then she tells her own story. Emerging from the Hive. Raccoon City. Matt's death. Then the desert and the survivors and the Los Angeles prison, which explains the lack of undead around the outer reaches of the city. By the time she's done, Rain has the entire gun out on the table in pieces and is slotting it back together. It's in good condition, despite the wear and tear. 

"And then you met your girlfriend," Rain says, teasing. Alice's grimace deepens. "Claire?"

"Oh. We're not... together." She pulls a knife from her boot and begins flipping it. Light, confident throws. "You?"

It takes Rain a minute to realise what she's asking.

"Oh, hell no. You know you're the only one for me." It's a joke, but Alice raises an eyebrow. "What? I got one shitty date before the apocalypse, and she was a straight-up psycho."

"Oh yeah?" Alice seems amused. She doesn't question the gender, which Rain is thankful for.

"Yeah. Four days out of jail for attempted murder and arson."

Alice laughs, which eases the stern expression on her face. 

"Well, there's not many dates available any more. Besides, we're all a bit crazy."

"You're telling me. I mean, you're going after Umbrella."

"Yes." Alice's face darkens. "I've taken down some large ones: Tokyo, Germany, North America. But that's not enough."

"Wait, North America?" Rain slots the final piece of the rifle back together and props it against the table leg. "Do you think that's why I woke up? If, when you sabotaged the base, my facility went under too?" 

Alice nods slowly, and then agrees. It would explain why Rain was so late to wake up.

"But if you want Umbrella down, you're going to have to take out HQ," Rain says. Alice lets the blade lay flat on the table. "And you're going to die. You're going to die, going after them like this." Alice looks away, then says,

"So?"

" _So?"_ Rain reaches out and covers Alice's hand with her own. "So?" We can't lose you. We need you."

"Once Umbrella are down, there won't be a place for me. People will recover, they'll rebuild, and there won't be a place for me there. I belong in warfare." Rain feels her calloused fingers, marked and scarred, as she turns her hand to meet palm-to-palm. She curls her fingers around Rain's. 

"Claire, her survivors - hell, all the survivors out there, are alive and fighting because of you, and you think that you can just walk away? that's not going to happen. We're going to fight with you."

"I wouldn't ask that of you," Alice replies quietly.

"Then doesn't ask. Like it or not, we're coming with you, all the fucking way. We -  _I_ need you.. Don't you dare start thinking about dying yet."

"I need you to survive," Alice says levelly. Rain actually blinks in surprise.

"You can't ask that of me if you're planning to go down with Umbrella."

Alice cups Rain's jaw with her free hand, stroking a thumb over her cheekbone. Rain freezes, unsure of how to react, and Alice uses her split-second advantage to lean over and kiss her gently, barely a brush of her lips.

"That's not fair," Rain says, her voice so much quieter than she wants it to be. "Don't use that to persuade me."

"I'll make a deal with you," Alice murmurs. She's still close, close enough that every word is ghosting over Rain's  mouth. "You stay alive for me, and I'll try to do the same."

"Not good enough." Rain shakes her head, draws back. "You will survive, or I swear to God I'll drag your ass all the fucking way back from Hell."

"Fine," Alice says. "Fine," and she's kissing Rain properly. Her scent steals through her and she breathes in, feeling her closeness, and God she missed human contact, any human contact. And this is Alice, who was there since the beginning. She  _needs_ her.

Alice draws back ever so slightly and Rain is about to follow her, but then she hears it.

Rotor blades.

"They're here," Alice whispers. She knows immediately.

Umbrella has come for them.


	4. Chapter 4

Alice is up and moving in an instant, pivoting to look at Rain. She grabs her rifle and nods.

"Let's kick some ass," she says, baring her teeth in a feral grin, and races beside Alice up the stairs. The sounds of rotor blades are drawing closer, becoming louder with every step she takes, until Alice stops dead right in the doorway and turns to her.

"What?" she asks, and the woman holds out a small black device. It takes Rain a minute to figure out it's a walkie-talkie.

"I've got the other one. I'm not losing you again," she says, promises, and then she pecks her on the lips and hurtles out the door. Rain takes off again, preparing for a battle, but is stopped dead for the second time in a minute when she sees the white-clothed survivors milling on the deck. There are so, so many, more than she ever dreamed there would be. 

And then she looks up.

There must be twenty, thirty, forty copters above them, weapons aimed.

Rain hits the red deck and rolls hard just as the first round of fire is unleashed, ploughing through the survivors. They scream, run, but she knows that they are sitting ducks here, exposed to Umbrella. She brings the stock of her rifle up to her shoulder and aims for the first black-clad figures that emerge. One falls, two, three, four, five, yet there are so many, dropping on ropes as they fire indiscriminately.

The first explosion rocks her back as a shockwave is unleashed, and she sees Alice, leaping and running and shooting, and she is so graceful and swift it makes Rain's heart ache. She is hers, and she will be damned before she is captured. The leading helicopter spins down with smoke and flames flying from its blades and hits the water with a splash she can feel even from beside the door. She redirects her fire towards the helicopters, and sees a second fall but it's not coming down into the sea, it's diving straight for them-

She turns her back the millisecond before it hits and it occurs that she may have just saved her own life by refusing to look. Metal crashes and grinds and tears free, flying free with a vengeance, and she arches her back and grits her teeth as shrapnel hits.

She can't stay here, so Rain makes a run for the little protection the doorframe offers. From here, she can just about see through the thick black smoke. Another copter swerves almost erratically towards the ship before she sees the ropes spilling from it. A whole team jumps from them, black-clothed and black-helmeted and it could easily have been  _her,_ fighting with her squad, until a final figure emerges. She - it's definitely a she - leaps from the copter with breathtaking confidence. Rain aims for her, identifying her as the leader easily, but she seems to actually pivot in the air like some kind of freaky Matrix-style shit. She's in a purple jumpsuit, V-necked, and she figures out why as soon as the woman lands. The sun glints off a silver and red spider attached to her chest, legs digging in.

Rain guesses it's something sketchy and probably dangerous. Alice zigzags across the deck towards her, still aiming at the copters even though she can tell it's a waste of time, and it clicks. The woman's crazy leap. Her grace. The spider nestling against her breastbone. The way her and Alice now move, synchronised despite their efforts. Alice must know this woman, have fought with her or against her.

Alice takes out a few of the team before they can even begin to return fire and Rain returns to herself, starts shooting. Not at the woman - that's so above her pay grade it seems like a joke - but at the black-suited people that have split up from their leader. They're gunning for the survivors. Not to kill, but to capture.

Throwing caution to the wind, Rain sprints from her place of relative safety and runs between the panicking people. This she can do. She knows the drills, the aims, the way they co-operate, what strategy they're using. She needs to regain order. They love to create chaos and then muscle their way in, cool and in command. 

"Jump overboard!" she screams, and they seem all too happy to take her advice. The  _Arcadia_ will not survive this attack, and she needs them off the ship, out of her way. Chris and Claire shove through the crowds to meet her. The woman gives her a grim nod and takes over the yelling, while Chris shoots her a wild grin and plunges back into the fray, both guns blazing. Rain leaves them to their jobs and runs for the last place she saw Alice, behind the smoking wreck.

She is just quick enough to glimpse Alice, still shooting at the woman, before there is a whistling. A whistling Rain has heard over and over again, during simulations, training protocols, and then out in the field.

It's the whistling of a bomb.

She isn't swift enough this time. Alice takes a running jump overboard, and the blast propels her further away from the ship. Rain feels a hot wind hit, then the shockwave. She is blasted back, flung almost back to the door.

Everything goes very quiet. She can feel the vibrations in the deck from the running feet, yet her mind feels slow. Sluggish. Blinking stupidly, she rolls into a kneeling position and tries to assess the damage. It takes a while for her eyes to come back into focus, but when they do it's to fire and smoke and a rust-red deck dripping with blood. 

Somebody is screaming. It sounds far away.

_On your feet._

She makes it to a standing position, and keeps her balance even as the deck roils unpleasantly beneath her. Her ears pop and the noise comes back, louder and closer. She looks for Alice, but all she can see are white-clothed people, the simple material stained with blood and grime. 

"Jump!" Claire is still screaming and Rain wants to rest, to lay down and sleep, but she isn't dead yet, so she moves. If she's not dead then she's not done. Staggering, she makes it to the rails and grabs on for dear life. Now Claire is pointing and yelling, and Rain follows her finger upwards. To the copters trained on them. They're going to shoot. She fixes one foot between the rail, swings the other above it. Her training is kicking in even now, keeping her alive, and she is just conscious enough to make an actual dive into the water rather than falling.  

It's cold, so fucking cold, and the temperature snaps her awake. She swims quick and efficient, away from the boat that was meant to save her, and reaches for a piece of shattered, splintered wood easily as long as her. Shivering, she drags herself half-on to it and kicks away, looking and looking and looking for Alice. She will survive, of course she will, she always does, but she can't lose her again, not so soon.

It's then that it occurs to her she still her bag slung over her shoulder. It's the bag that's kept her alive, with her weapons and map and radio inside it, and that's where she earlier shoved the camcorder. She'd picked it up a lifetime ago from the red plane that had crashed on the deck.

She'll figure it out later. Rain rests her head on the plank, splinters be damned, and swims away from the Arcadia as it blossoms into flame.

 

It's a fucking long swim, and then it's a run, and she doesn't stop moving until she reaches the top of a building with a flat concrete roof. There she bars all the entrances and exits and sits - or rather collapses - on the edge of the roof. God, she's tired. And hungry.

Growling with irritation, she dumps the bag on the concrete and fishes things out one by one. Her map, wet and pulpy, but she spreads it out anyway, hoping it'll dry out. Then a few spare rounds, followed by a compass that somehow still works. She taps it a couple of times and the needle re-centres. Next she produces her radio, which is totally fucked, unsurprisingly. She tosses it aside. The notebook with the coordinates follows, the ink having run and irreparably stained the thin pages.

Last of all she retrieves a single sad tin of soup and the camcorder. She drinks the soup straight down from the tin while messing with the camcorder.

To her utter surprise, it still works. It must have been one of those expensive waterproof kinds. She opens it up, and Alice's face flickers on the screen.

"My name is Alice. I worked for the Umbrella Corporation..."

Rain just sits and watches the first recording, then the next. Alice recounts it all. The Hive. Her fragmented memories, which make so much more sense now, after Spence's betrayal. How the T-virus escaped and wrecked first Raccoon City, then the world. Some of it she already knows, but most is entirely new information. Her name comes up, always accompanied by a brief flicker of a sad smile, and her heart twists. She'd been so alone for so long.

And then she talks about the Nevada Desert, the mutated monsters Isaacs created. What Umbrella did to her, how she can be so swift and lethal where others would stumble and fall. She remembers the woman in purple, her not-quite-human battle with Alice, and guesses she must have been the anti-Alice. Umbrella reclaiming their property. Her lips thin.

"I became different. Powerful. Unstoppable."

The next few document the beginnings of her journey. Rain speeds through a couple and figures out Alice thought  _Arcadia_ was a town. She watches her hijack a small red plane, the small red plane that had crashed on deck, and fly. When she's seen enough, she puts aside the camcorder and sits back on the wall. Alice has been through more than she could have ever guessed, and she did it alone, unaware Rain was lying in an Umbrella facility alive. She had watched her die, then Matt, then everything she ever knew crashed and burned around her.

Rain can relate.

She goes to pull off her still-damp sleeveless jacket, then hesitates. In her pocket is the walkie-talkie Alice had slipped her a few hours earlier. It won't work at this distance. She pulls it out anyway, though, and turns it round in her fingers, then freezes. 

On the back is Umbrella's logo, painted in white and red. She touches it tentatively. She might have known - after all, what else would still function during the apocalypse? She turns it over and over in her hands, wondering if it was bugged and trackable. Probably. What it came down was whether she trusted Alice: using it would undeniably reveal her location to anybody still watching out for errant survivors, and maybe bring down biohazards on her. Having already dealt with one, she's pretty sure another counter would prove fatal.

Does she trust Alice?

"Hello?" she says. "Alice?"

She's bringing it away from her ear when a voice answers.

"Who is this?" A woman's voice. Smooth and cold. "What is your operative number?"

"Fuck you," she snarls. "Where's Alice?"

"Are you referring to Project Alice? We thought you may call, Rain. My name is Jill Valentine."

 _Jill._ Alice had mentioned her on the tapes, the woman that had helped her escape Raccoon City. An ex-Star. Clearly, Umbrella had gotten hold of her before Alice could re-establish contact. She thinks about the woman in purple on the Arcadia, the silver-red bug attached to her chest. That must have been her. They fought each other like they were friends, once, or maybe allies. Now she has a face to fit to the name and voice.

"We have Project Alice, Ocampo. You would do well to turn yourself in, before one of our less... civilised operatives catches up with you."

Rain is throwing things into her bag, leaving behind the useless items, a knife already in her hand.

"You don't know, do you?" she says into the walkie-talkie. She can almost see Jill frowning.

"Know what, Rain?"

"The joke's on you. You haven't got Alice, she's got you right where she wants. You think you know fire and fury?" Rain smirks. "If you hurt her, she will unleash Hell on you. She is going to burn Umbrella to the ground. And then she will destroy anyone who stands in her way, and I'll be right there with her. We are coming for you, Valentine. I only hope she gets to you before I do."

She swings the bag onto her shoulder.

"Because she's kind, and she might show mercy. But me?" She laughs. "Jill, I am coming for you. And I will never stop coming. So you send whatever you want my way, and I'll kill it all. And then, when you're regretting not murdering me when you had the chance, I will bring the corporation down around you. So I hope you're running, because we are hunting _you."_

She stands up and throws the walkie-talkie over the edge of the roof. It shatters when it hits the street, and Rain grins as she draws her knives and turns to face the city beneath her.

She will kill them, and shatter their control, and destroy their monsters.

She will find Alice again. She always does. But for now, she has to survive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so gay for badass!Rain I'm sorry


	5. Chapter 5

It has been ten years. Rain knows this because she was told by a hard-faced man. His corpse is at her feet, eyes glazed, mouth open. 

She wasn't quick enough to save him.

Nor was she quick enough to save the twenty others. The last remaining survivor of those twenty is coughing her way to stillness opposite Rain, mouth twisted with bitterness and hatred, glaring at her. Rain unsheathes her knives. Not long now.

The woman chokes and gasps before she falls limply, sliding down the wall to rest spread-eagled against the concrete. Outside, there are the beginnings of shuffling feet that mean the group are coming round again, waking from death to hunt her. The woman's eyes fly open and she lunges at Rain, but she is not fast enough. A bullet drops her. Then there is one less human on the planet.

She stalks out the gas station. There is empty desert around her for nothing but miles, punctuated only by the shrivelled dead and the occasional wrecked car, so she does not bother putting down the couple outside that turn to her as she emerges. She just swings a leg over her bike and takes off, anger lining her muscles. Those people had held out for a decade against the undead, but they were no match for Umbrella. The operatives had dropped from helicopters into the centre of the compound, eerily reminiscent of the scene on the Arcadia, and gone in guns blazing. They had taken no prisoners.

Rain's escape, along with the few others, had been a fluke, born of sheer luck and a clumsy mistake on behalf of one of the operatives. They had fled right out the front into the arms of the undead, guessing it would slow their enemies down, and had driven out to the middle of nowhere. They had never suspected one of the group was infected.

Her guilt bites at her. She should never have sought out other humans. Her conversation with Valentine had only happened a week or so ago, yet they were still on her tail despite her evasive journey inland. She had brought Umbrella to the compound. The deaths were on her head. 

 _I have learnt my lesson._ Her jaw sets. No meeting people, not any more. She can't risk it. She has to stay alone.

 

Rain makes good progress. The sun always seems to blaze these days, rain being a rare luxury, so she travels light and fast, low and hard. What she's picked up has been pared back to the basics: weapons and ammo, water and a little food. Nothing she cannot drop at any time. The days pass slow out here, but she can't afford extra weight. 

She's still angry when she finally settles down for the night, pulling out her guns to tuck underneath her makeshift bedroll. People are dead because of her stupidity, because she didn't think. Umbrella are on her. They'll follow wherever she goes, and she should have thought about it. But she didn't. She was only thinking about Alice.

Alice. Who she hasn't seen she leaped from the deck of the Arcadia, propelled out by an explosion. Valentine said they had her, which she didn't doubt, but where? Raccoon City, maybe. That was where everything had started. It would be a fitting place. Or Washington, or New York. Somewhere so busy and crowded, any survivors would have been wiped out by the sheer numbers of the undead in the early days. Maybe it wasn't even in America. If she had been taken overseas, she would be out of reach. 

Rain shakes her head, frustrated. She isn't in it for saving the world - far as she's concerned, the world's beyond saving. All she wants is to get Alice and demolish Umbrella, hopefully in that order. She can't waste time on useless suspicions. Umbrella won't be.

 

It takes her three days to even begin to close in on Washington. It's a guess, but one thing the woman from the compound says keeps playing on her mind.

 _"I heard that there's something sketchy up there,"_ she had shrugged when Rain pushed her for information on something, anything outside their territory.  _"Lots of monsters. Things you wouldn't believe. Or maybe you would."_ She had peered closely at her face.  _"You look like you've seen more than us."_

It was a shot in the dark, but then most of what she did was. She preferred to do the hunting rather than be the hunted, and to be honest she had no fucking clue what she was meant to do. Umbrella undoubtedly had a lock on her location and destination, but they had only gone for the kill when she reached the compound.

That's when she leans back on the bike and swears. Repeatedly. Loudly. 

Fucking hell, she's stupid. So fucking dumb. They haven't killed her because she's more useful alive, and she's just proved that usefulness by taking them right to survivors. And if they don't have Alice, she's their best bet. She knows Alice better than they do, enough to predict her next move. Valentine probably thought she's won the lottery when she realised the person on the other end of the line had a direct connection to Alice. No wonder she'd been so goading, hoping Rain would take the bait. Shit, even if they do have Alice, she's good for finding the way to survivor outposts. Outposts that they can easily wipe out, just letting her get away so she'd get spooked and head to the next. Maye it was good all the others were dead - otherwise, they would have led Umbrella to even more.

"Why don't you just fight me?" she shouts, bringing the bike to a stop. "Just fucking kill me!"

There's no answer from the clear blue sky. Just the sun and the desert and the heat. But they are watching. 

She can't lead them to any more survivor outposts, no matter how bad she's struggling. Rain sighs and kicks the bike into gear again. There's no point changing direction. If they have Alice, there's nothing she can do. The woman can care for herself, and it wouldn't be a surprise if she'd already escaped or pissed them off somehow. All she can do is keep moving on.

She stops briefly when the sun is at its hottest and risks an hour of catnapping. Usually she'll stop twice daily - once while it's midday, once in the darkest hours of the night. Umbrella's training has proved useful while maintaining a punishing pace towards Washington and she's staying steady on a few hours of sleep, though God knows it was easier doing the training. Or maybe it was just easier then because she had her team, JD teasing her and Kaplan complaining whenever One allowed them a few moments, Warner and Drew laughing in the background as Danilova rolls her eyes. 

Now, though, it's just her. Now, they're all dead and their corpses have been rotting underground for ten years. It's a pretty sobering thought. 

She could do with a book. Or a good lay. It gets boring and miserable, being in a desert alone day after day, especially when her brief periods of human contact tended to be with the undead. She should probably look for a book the next time she makes a stop, but... it's extra weight. Unnecessary extra weight. She travels hard and fast and light, and all she carries with her are her weapons, ammo, water, Alice's camcorder, and whatever little food she brings with her. 

Then there's the slightest of sounds. Faint, but growing louder.

Rain shoots to her feet, one hand on her knives, the other holding her gun. It's an engine, heading for her.

There's no cover on the flat, dusty earth, but Rain lays her bike down anyway, grabs her sleeveless jacket and shrugs it on. Then she cocks the gun and waits.

Sure enough, a small cloud of dust become visible. It's a motorbike, which both reassures and unnerves Rain. Not Umbrella, they travel in groups, but the chance of a lone wanderer just happening upon her? No fucking way.

The bike slows when it's within shooting distance and Rain identifies it as a modern model, once sleek black, now stained with dust and dirt from travel. The rider cuts the engine and dismounts, hands up. They approach carefully, calmly, until they're no more than two metres away from her.

"Stop," Rain orders, and they do. They're wearing a helmet, black visor down, and black clothes, leather and latex cut in a V-neck. It doesn't look very practical.

"I'm going to take off my helmet," they say, voice still muffled, and reach up to their head slowly. Rain lets them, seeing no reason to stop the stranger.

The stranger turns out to be a she, blonde hair falling around her shoulders. 

"Hi," she says. "I'm Jill Valentine."

Rain fires the gun.

The bullet grazes her hair, and she stumbles, shocked.

"Don't move a step," Rain orders, stepping closer. Valentine's hands are in the air, and she looks shocked. She doesn't buy it.

"Woah, woah! I'm unarmed! My weapons are over there!" She jerks her head towards the bike, which does have a black bag attached to the back. Rain steps around her cautiously, not taking the gun off her, and opens it. There's one pistol, one shotgun, and a couple of flasks of water. 

"OK, what's the game?" she asks, moving away from the bike. Valentine blinks. 

"What?"

"Did they send you in here? Try to earn my trust?"

"Who? Who  _are_ you?"

"I'm Rain Ocampo!" she snaps. At Valentine's blank look, she reels off her operative number.

"Wait, you're with Umbrella? What the hell's an operative doing alone out here?"

"Ex-operative," Rain says automatically. "And anyway, what the fuck? You talked to me a week ago!"

Valentine actually flinches, and that's when she sees the marks on her chest. Scars, still red and healing. Rain slings the gun over her back, pulls out her knives, and approaches her.

"I don't remember that," Valentine whispers. Rain puts one knife against her throat and with the other peels back some of the leather that's half-obscuring the marks. They're fresh, no doubt about it. Six longer ones and one large and round, right in the centre of her chest. "I don't remember anything until I woke up in Russia. My friend was there. She saved me."

"What from?" Rain grunts, letting the leather lay back. Valentine gently draws back from the knife at her throat.

"Umbrella. They'd captured me."

She snorts, considers killing Valentine. But the woman looks so genuine that she has to have some respect for her acting skills.

"All right then, this heroic friend have a name?"

"Alice."

"Bullshit," she growls, bringing the knife back up to Valentine's exposed throat. "Don't you dare fucking lie to me, Valentine. Not about her."

"Who? Alice? I don't know you! I've never met you, are you crazy?"

"She has brown hair that she's cut short," Rain says. "And a badass, tough attitude, but she'd die for the people she loves. She always has a fuckload of weapons on her, and she hates Umbrella, and she was a guard at the Hive."

"She helped me escape Raccoon City. I was captured by Umbrella and they controlled me, put me in charge of security in the Russian base. Alice was rescued by a group of survivors, sent by Wesker, and then he airlifted us to Washington."

"And?" She sheathes one of the knives, flips the other in her hand.

"Then he betrayed us. I'm sure Alice made it out, but the others..." She shakes her head.

Rain leaves Valentine standing where she is and stalks back to her bike. The other woman follows her at a distance. She doesn't trust her, or her story, but she seems so genuine. She might even be inclined to believe her, if she hadn't spoken to her a few days ago. There was, however, one way to check if Valentine was actually involved in the Raccoon City disaster. She pulls open the bag on her bike and grabs the camcorder, flipping it on. Alice's face appears. She's talking about the Arcadia again so Rain winds it back, almost to the beginning, where she details her story. Valentine lingers by her shoulder, not saying anything even though she must be desperate to.

_"Once I got out the Hive, I found the infection had spread to Raccoon City. It was chaos. I found a few people along the way, though. A young girl, Angie, and a reporter, Terri. LJ and Peyton - LJ was with the convoy for a while - and there was someone else. A woman, Jill Valentine. She seemed... sensible. Very well trained, and I suppose we became friends. She was ex-S.T.A.R.s, so she was pretty well set up for the end of the world. I think Umbrella got her, though, in the end."_

"They did," Valentine says. "They put something here." She places a palm over the scars. "She got it off, but it was feeding some sort of memory-loss drug. I was useless for a long time, and by the time I was functional again, Washington was down."

Well, Alice had met Valentine - and trusted her. Rain knows how hard it is to earn her trust, so she must have done something right. 

"Why does she hate Umbrella?" she asks finally. If Valentine is still being controlled by Umbrella they won't know the answer. She'll blab something about betrayal, or trying to kill her, or murdering everyone she's ever met. But that's not the reason she's looking for. Those are easy guesses.

"Because they took away her humanity," Valentine says quietly, bitterly. "They made her into their monster, and tried to take away who she was."

Rain walks to her bike and swings one leg over.

"Wait! Where are you going?"

She glances at Valentine and flashes a sharp smirk.

"Are you coming?"

"You trust me?" She crosses her arms. 

"I only trust Alice." She lets a moment pass. "But you'll do. You're not Umbrella. That's good enough for me."

 

Valentine asks where she's going when they stop hours later, the night having fallen thick and fast over the desert. Rain tells her Raccoon City. Washington has fallen. It's where Umbrella will be, where their main base of operations has moved to, and where the bosses will be waiting. It's an easy day's ride away, which isn't long at the pace she moves. She knows Alice will be there. 

"Have you been under Umbrella's control for ten years?" she asks Valentine. The woman looks surprised.

"It's been that long?"

"Apparently."

"You don't look like you've been around for a decade," she observes, tipping her head to one side. Rain smiles lazily.

"I woke up in a facility a while back. I was in the Hive with Alice - that's how we met."

"You were there at the start." Valentine looks shocked. "You're  _Rain._ Her Rain. She talked about you."

"Oh yeah? What did she say?"

"You were her biggest regret. She called out your name in her nightmares. I thought you were an enemy, before she said..." She pauses. "She said you'd died."

"I did."

"You don't look dead."

"I'm not."

"Is that why they want you?"

"They want me?" Rain asks. She thought Umbrella's only interest was in Alice. Valentine frowns.

"They've always wanted you. They said you were the... first, or the original, or something like that - something valuable. Fuck, I don't know. I don't really want to."

Rain watches her for a moment. She seems at ease, almost, sitting with her feet tucked under her. Meditative or some shit. 

And suddenly she's tired. Valentine, or Jill, or whatever, might betray her, or she might not. Maybe she'll ride all the way to Raccoon City with her or maybe she'll try to kill her halfway there, but it doesn't matter, she doesn't give a fuck, because she wants to find Alice and that's it. Fuck the world. The world can burn. 

"How come you aren't dead?" Valentine says quietly.

"I don't know. I mean, I was. I got bit, died, turned, came back, the whole way, but it was like it happened to someone else. I mean, Umbrella can't bring people back from the dead, can they? So whether I was or wasn't doesn't matter." She gets to her feet and pulls her spare jacket off the bike seat.

"You can have that."

"I'm fine," Valentine shoots back. Rain rolls her eyes. 

"Fine, freeze to death. All that-" she gestures at the ridiculous clothes "isn't going to keep you warm out here."

She smirks to herself while the woman pulls it on, obviously irritated, and lays down to sleep. Rain props her bike up and grabs her bedroll, then tucks a knife under it just in case. She faces away from Valentine, staring into the night. 

_A face hovers over her. A name goes with it, a name at the edge of her mind..._

_"Doctor Isaacs."_

_Isaacs._

_"She's ready."_

_His mouth moves. She can read his lips. "Excellent," he's saying. "Wake her up. Install the memories."_

Rain sits bolt upright, reaching blindly for the knife at first until she realises her panic is coming from inside her, not her environment. She breathes in, out, steady, slowing her heart rate. 

She remembers.

How she died.

How she survived.

 


	6. Chapter 6

_"What if she asks about the bites?"_

_Rain swims back to consciousness slowly, pushing past the drowsiness to hear soft words mumbled from behind a surgeon's mask. The voice is low. Male._

_"She will not ask anything." Isaacs. "She will be left in the Raccoon City facility. Besides, she is nothing apart from a way to get to Project Alice - if that. This is merely a failsafe. We can terminate her any time we like, after all." Fingers, cold and gloved, trail over her temple. Rain would have shuddered if she were more awake._

_"We will not... guide her, sir?"_

_"We will, Doctor. However, if Project Alice proves one thing, it is that being too heavy-handed has unpleasant consequences. We will be less of a tangible presence, more like fate. To her, I will be a god."_

"Rain? Rain!"

"Yeah?" she says, snaps almost. Valentine nearly flinches, then her expression settles into granite.

"What's up with you? I bet you haven't heard a single word I said." 

She wants to argue that point, but she can't really. It's been a day and a half since her memories started trickling back, and already she's snappish, on edge. Valentine's obviously noticed.

"If I'm pissing you off that much, then you should just leave," she growls back. The woman clenches her jaw. They've had this argument twice already today but she's gearing up for round number three. 

"Told you, I don't care if Umbrella are tracking you. If they don't like me being with you, they would've done something already 'stead of waiting for us to tear each other's throats out." 

Rain kicks her bike into a higher speed and Valentine lets herself fall back slightly. God, she's tired. And angry. And fucking terrified and wondering if she should be heading in the opposite direction to Alice, running and running and running away from her for her protection rather than racing for her at a pace that is beginning to wear on her very bones even if she won't show it. And of course, then there's Valentine who still refuses to leave.

"I'm not even a real fucking person," Rain hisses.

"What?" The woman's alongside her again. Rain realises she heard her.

"I'm not even a real fucking person," she repeats. Then she slows the bike to a stop. So does Valentine. "I'm a goddamned fucking clone!"

Valentine doesn't say anything, just watches her. She's surprised, clearly, but not shocked or confused.

"You knew it," Rain says.

"No. Not about you. How do you?"

"They fucked with my head, sure, but I was never meant to be functional for this long," she says, then tips her head back and screams at the sky, "Was I, you fuckers?"

"What were you... I mean, why did they wake you up? Who did they model you off?"

"Me," she says bitterly. "The real me, not some carbon copy with her memories. Except I died, and I mean properly died, on the way out of the Hive. I got bitten, then shot." She holds up her hand. There's faded scars there, imprints of toothmarks, and similar ones in her neck. Ones where JD bit her. All the wounds from the Hive, cut into her and scarred over while her memories were downloaded. She wonders if Isaacs did it, carving flaws into his creation. 

"They... you're not meant to remember," Valentine says. Rain bites down hard on her lip until she tastes blood. "But then, if they wanted someone for the short term, I suppose less effort was put in to concealing the memories."

"Did you see them?" In her mind's eye, she can imagine rows and rows of Rains, hanging from a hook, black-clothed and blank-faced. The image is so vivid she wonders if it's her imagination or just another buried memory.

"A few. There was an African-American man with a shaved head. A woman with dark hair - she was a medic of some kind, I think. A tech expert."

One. Danilova. Kaplan. 

A space opens up inside Rain, yawning wide. She wants to scream and fight and hide. She wants to burn Umbrella to the ground.

"Did you know them?" Valentine asks. 

"They were my teammates. All dead." That didn't stop Umbrella, though, from bringing them back to life. They were just phantoms like her now. Long dead.

_"Is she a long-term model, sir?"_

_"No."_

 

They know when they come close to Raccoon City because they see not one winged biohazard, not two, but three. They're similar to the one Rain took down when she was fresh out the facility, and her hands throb in memory of glass buried deep in her flesh. 

"How do we kill them?" Valentine asks. The blonde dye in her hair is beginning to fade, darker strands showing through. They are exposed on a hilltop overlooking the city, only some dead bushes around.

"I don't know. I only had one to deal with last time. Bullets don't hurt them though, whatever they are. I brought down a house on its head and that seemed to do the trick." 

The woman snorts and angles her head, watching the monsters flap over the crater in the centre of the city. She looks like she's beginning to form a plan.

"Don't they look like they're guarding it?" she murmurs. Rain frowns and looks back up at them. They are almost certainly circling the crater, two flying over a wider circle that seems to include the bridge while the last and biggest monster keeps a steady pace directly over the heart of the crater. Whatever lies there, it must be the key to the base.

Unless… unless the Hive is the base. Her mind clicks back to it, seeing the memories in a new light. The canteens - why did they have so many, with so much food? Why was the Licker's mechanical womb situated right in their path rather than in some triple-sealed deadlocked antechamber where Umbrella could be sure it would never see light? Why be underground of all places, where there was only one way out, one way that had no cameras or lights, only a train that could carry a maximum of twenty people to the surface?  Almost like it wasn't about getting people out if there was an emergency, but rather keeping them in. Almost as if any safety guidelines or protocol were ignored in virtue of having a virtually impenetrable bunker, guarded by monsters and biohazards and a psychopathic AI. 

"I'm going to fucking kill them all," she hisses between her teeth. Valentine opens her mouth to say something. "Shut up."

"Wha-"

"Shut up!" Rain gasps, and grabs her and hits the worn tarmac so hard she'll be picking gravel out her chin for the next week. Because there in the distance, just faintly, there's the roar of an engine. 

"A survivor?" Valentine whispers, turning her head to make eye contact. Rain makes a facial expression she used to use whenever JD was around. It means,  _shut your mouth and stop being stupid._ So the woman shuts her mouth.

The engine comes closer and closer, until she can identify at least three bikes. It seems motorbikes are getting more popular nowadays. She risks pulling herself forward just an inch, just enough so that she can see past the spiky thorn bush that obscures her vision. Three bikes, the Umbrella insignia painted bold and bright on their sides, the riders decked out in all black with similar insignias on their shoulders. Visors are pulled down low. They're scanning the landscape, and Rain swears silently when they spot the two bikes propped up at the edge of the road. Three swift, sharp hand signals and they split, coming around, and God there's only a second before they see them, lying on the ground like defenceless, useless idiots.

She twists around to face Valentine and the woman seems to read the whole situation in her face. Then she's up on her feet, sprinting towards the bike that is still roaring at her. Rain doesn't let herself watch to see how that turns out: already the other riders are changing course, and she pushes herself upright and runs at the rider who is slowest to turn. 

She launches herself at him and braces for impact, thinking _oh fuck oh fuck this is going to hurt._ And it does as he slips off his bike with the force of his impact, but she lands on top of him and does not give a second to the pain in her elbow, the shooting agony in her jaw when it hits his helmet. She yanks his arm up, going for an incapacitating move rather than a fatal one but he moves quicker than an asp, wrenching free and rolling away and Christ, he's fast as he jumps to his feet. 

She takes the invitation to jump at him, foot coming up to land squarely in the centre of his chest and he stumbles. The body armour takes most of the impact, though, so he doesn't hit the floor like anyone else does. Instead he comes right back at her and his fist grazes her cheekbone and she jerks away, catches that fist and uses the momentum to spin him further than he planned to go and then she gets her fingers under the back of his helmet and pulls up, sharply. 

The helmet comes loose and she gets a proper grip on it. The man is just turning to face her, face full of fear, as she swings at his face. There's a very satisfying crunch and he hits the floor like a sack of potatoes. 

Rain looks for Valentine and finds her grappling with one rider, his bike discarded a few feet away. The last rider is jumping off, a hand going to his waist and she knows from months and months and months of training that he's drawing a pistol rather than a rifle for precision. Execution. 

He hears her coming, feet hitting the hard-packed ground as she sprints for him, and fires. The bullet whistles past her ear, just nicking her, and she needs to get the gun off him if she wants to survive this-

A kick that she dodges, throws a punch in retaliation that hits his shoulder, unbalancing him, because the shoulders are a weak point in their armour, protecting nothing vital, and he staggers enough that the punch he throws her way is clumsy. Clumsy to the point that she slips under his guard and then they're fighting for the pistol, both of his hands on it locking hers into place. Out of the corner of her eye she realises Valentine is on the ground wrestling her opponent, then the operative she's facing pulls his hands down.

She knows that move. Jerks sideways as it comes back up, aiming for her chin in a blow that would knock her out. Tugs and her hands come free with the pistol. Aims and fires.

His head rocks back with a flash of red. 

She spares no time in spinning and sprinting for Valentine, the woman still on the ground with the rider now on top of her. She braces herself and fires. 

She doesn't miss, but then she rarely does. The last man slumps to the ground and Valentine, face and hands smeared with blood - hers or his, she has no idea - gets shakily to her feet.

"Thank you," she says to Rain. Rain nods awkwardly and clicks the pistol's safety on.

"You're welcome," she replies, and that's when the woman's eyes widen in shock. Not at her, she realises too late, but at a spot over her shoulder. Rain turns, already swinging the gun up, but by the time she sees the last operative, striding towards her with a gun braced in both hands, he's fired.

 

When Rain wakes up, she thinks she's dead. Again.

Her senses come back to her slowly. She's on a hard metal table, covered with nothing more than a scrap of pale fabric. That brings back memories, and she blinks her eyes open. White, bright lights. Sterile walls. There's at least three people around her, she can tell by the soft movements of their feet on the floor. 

She tries to shift, move, but she's locked in. Panic rises at the restraints holding her down, strapped over her waist and neck and ankles and wrists that no pulling and tugging can move.

"Now, now," says a very familiar voice. Rain can't twist her head to see as a figure looms into being by her side, clothed in surgeon's scrubs and a white operating mask. But she can see as pale hands reach up and pull the mask down to his neck, revealing a sharp smile. "That won't do, will it?" 

Dark eyes bore into her own and Rain can barely contain a shudder at the cruelty in the lines of the face. 

"Doctor Isaacs," she says.

"Ah," he says, and his smile grows wider. "It is a pleasure to see you again, Rain."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> not too far to go now!!


	7. Chapter 7

Doctor Isaacs does enjoy the sound of his own voice, of that Rain's fairly certain. In between the periods where she's drugged or sleeping he sits and talks to her. Her own input is rarely required, and since most of it involves creative ways of telling him to go fuck himself, she guesses he prefers silence from her.

"Do you know that to you, I am a god?" he says sometimes. Or, "Tell us what you have heard of project Alice, Rain." Or, "I'm thinking of implanting a chip in your head. Right about here," and his gloved finger taps at her temple. "At the click of a button, you will experience agony. We could control it as we pleased." Thankfully, he never carries through on that threat, opting rather to oversee her operations and sit at her bedside to bore her. Rain would strangle him if her wrists were not always cuffed or tied down.

She believes about a week passes, but her sense of time grows hazy. Always there are people in the room - Isaacs by himself, or the syringe-wielding anaesthetist who puts her out and brings her round, sometimes a nurse or doctor that ignore her cries for help or screams of anger. They move as though automated, hands busy, faces hidden behind surgical masks.  Rain fights their cold touches, bites when fingers come within reach, kicks if they free her feet. Not once do the blows ever connect, but she will not stop fighting. Not now, not ever.

 

She wakes early from a drugged sleep a few hours after Isaacs leaves her bedside to an empty room. The lack of a person either by her monitors or next to her bed already has her tensing, wary, unused to being alone. This is her chance.

Rain pulls at the fastenings, and finds today her hands are cuffed rather than tied, which extends her reach - not by much, but enough, maybe, to stretch to the left. There's a folder and a bundle of papers. She catches the edge, drags it closer until she can fiddle with the paperclip that holds the sheets together.

Yes. Clumsy from disuse, it's difficult at first to flex her fingers and set to work bending the paperclip out of shape and inserting it into the keyhole of her cuffs. It's five minutes before she frees one hand. The other hand, and then her legs, take only another two minutes, and then she's free.

Rain swings her legs over the edge of the bed and stands. Then she sits right back down, because she hasn't been upright for a week and there's still some kind of sedative coursing through her veins, which is not helping with her sense of gravity.

The door opens. Rain's head shoots up.

It's an operative, a gun holstered at his hip. Shock slows his reactions and by the time his hand is halfway there she's lashing out. His neck snaps at an ugly angle. The next moment she's on the floor, pulling at his weapons. She's still in that ridiculous shift, barely covering any skin, shivering as the cold air hits when she makes a second attempt at standing up. It goes more successfully this time and she staggers to the door frame, checks right and left.

She makes it to a junction of corridors before she sees anyone. Another operative. She shoots him between the eyes. Then finally her training begins to kick in and she backs down white halls, shooting out any cameras she can see. And suddenly a voice from behind her.

"Rain?"

She nearly shoots when she swings around.

It's Valentine.

"The fuck are you doing here?" Rain hisses.

"Rescuing you, what do you think? We thought-"

"We?"

"I made some friends," Valentine says, apparently feeling no need whatsoever to explain further. "Look, we have twenty minutes." She holds up a black watch, numbers in glowing red counting down. "Can we please get to the minimum safe distance?"

Rain makes to holster the gun before she realises she's still wearing the fucking strip of cloth.

"Fine," she says. Valentine pulls out a small device from her pocket - since when did she have pockets? Or wear a miniskirt? That couldn't be practical - and a 3-D map flashes up. Rain blinks. "So your friends like new tech?"

The smile she gets in return gives nothing away.

 

Valentine sets a quick pace through the complex. They see few people on their way, only a couple of nurses and doctors, and Valentine shoots them before Rain can. Within ten minutes they are outside, throwing open a back door to sprint down and Valentine hurls herself into a Jeep waiting outside.

"Come on!" she hollers at Rain, and it's only the shuffling feet of the undead she can hear that actually convinces her to get in. The car accelerates away from the white hospital.

Rain leans her head back on the seat and sighs. Beside her, a woman smiles and Rain glares in return. The smile drops.

"Hi, Rain," says the man driving.

"Who the fuck are you people?" she asks. "And what's Valentine got to do with this?"

"They're S.T.A.R.s," Valentine says patiently, turning around in her seat to look at her. "Or ex-S.T.A.R.s. They escaped when the T-virus first broke out."

"I'm Vasquez, scout and sharpshooter," the woman says. "That's Dietrich, our ex-leader."

He flips her off in the wing mirror and Vasquez laughs.

"We're heading back to base," she continues. "There's a couple of others there. Crowe, Apone, Ferro, all ex-S.T.A.R.s, and two civvies."

"They're not civilians any more," Dietrich rumbles from the front seat. Vasquez's lips narrow but she nods reluctantly. "Anyway, we found Valentine left for dead on the outskirts of Raccoon City and dragged her back to base. Took us a couple of weeks to find you, sorry about that, but she said we had to rescue you. Thought you'd be dead by now, to be honest."

"A couple of weeks?" Rain manages. She must have been unconscious for far longer than she'd expected.

"Fifteen days," Vasquez says. "Though the extraction was really easy. It was like they wanted us to take you."

 _It was like they wanted us to take you._ She winces, presses a hand to the side of her head, pushing for the memory. Isaacs - where had he been? - Isaacs saying... a tracker. That was it. She'd been out after another surgery to fix something important and he'd been standing on the edge of her vision, talking to another white-coated doctor.

"We can track her wherever," she mumbles.

"Huh?" Valentine twists around to look at her again.

"Stop the car!" she shouts.

"They'll be right on our trail-" begins Dietrich.

"Stop the fucking car!"

He does. Rain staggers out, the dusty ground coming up to meet her. There's undead not thirty metres away, stumbling towards her. Vasquez shoots it, and there's Valentine, lifting her, trying to drag her back in.

"A knife," she manages. "Give me a fucking knife."

Dietrich crouches in front of her. He lifts her chin up to look her in the eye, and whatever he sees must convince him because he unsheathes a curved blade and hands it to her. Rain traces up the vein in her forearm, feeling for any little bumps...

There. She digs the tip of the knife in and blood spurts. Another twist and agony flares bright up her arm, but the edge of the blade catches on the small chip and she massages the skin with her fingers. Then another twist, cutting into the flesh, and she bears up with the knife, feeling every gush of blood that drips onto her shift. But the chip comes out and she catches it with shaking fingers.

"Tracker," she mutters. Dietrich looks pretty horrified, but Valentine takes it from her and throws it away somewhere among the ruins.

"Are there any more?" she asks. Rain probes over her other arm, the back of her neck, her temples. Her collarbones. There's something there, too. She brings up the blade and presses in. It's the same flaring agony, the same feeling of blood soaking the fabric to her skin. She's still cold. This takes less time and soon she's holding the second one, which she tosses away in the opposite direction. Hopefully they'll think she got torn apart and scattered over the city.

"Think that's all," she says. Dietrich calls to Vasquez and they back up into the car. Vasquez opens a first-aid kit tucked in the footwell and hands her some bandages, which Rain wraps around her arm. She presses on the wound on her collarbone, guessing it will need stitches.

"Where actually are we?" she asks. Her mind feels more clear now for some reason, the pain sharpening reality, carving off the foggy edges.

"Closest town to Raccoon City," Dietrich says from the front. Rain relaxes slightly. Close to Raccoon City meant close to Alice, or it would soon. If the Hive really was a base, she was sure Alice would show up at some point. If it wasn't, then she could be anywhere.

 

The Jeep slows and stops next to a block of flats. They get out and climb what must be at least five or ten flights up. With every step, Rain's disused muscles scream, reminding her of how out of shape she is. But then they reach the top, and Dietrich shows her the makeshift wooden bridge that connect the first block to the second, and her exhaustion vanishes into annoyance.

"It helps confuse the undead," Dietrich says by way of explanation. "We can move from building to building without being observed by anybody on the ground."

The second building has a small farm on its roof, and people cluster together to greet them. Rain is very aware of the looks being shot her way and her vulnerability in the shift, so Valentine leads her downstairs a short way to get changed.

"I can't stay with them," Rain says, pulling on black jeans and a red T-shirt.

"I'm not asking you to," Valentine says. Rain finds a leather jacket and puts that on, too. Then she moves, barefoot, to the weapons. "I'm just saying, try it. Maybe they'll surprise you."

"They'll die." Rain takes two long, curved knives and sheathes them in her belt. "Alice might be priority, but I can find her for them. That puts me high on the kill list for Umbrella once they've got her, and maybe before if they think I've outlived my usefulness." A rifle goes over her back. "They should leave, and so should you."

"Me?" Rain thinks the woman's tone was bizarrely surprised.

"Run and keep running. That's got to be your best hope."

"Yours too."

"Fuck that. I'm going to find Alice again even if it kills me. Besides, Umbrella needs taking down. Who the fuck's going to do that with her? I can't leave her to sacrifice herself for some great cause."

Then she looks at Valentine and sees she's smiling, with one eyebrow raised.

"You know what, fuck you," she says dryly. Valentine laughs. Rain pulls on black boots and tucks a knife down the inside of each one, then grabs a pistol and holsters it at her hip. A second goes at the back of her jeans.

They're interrupted by the unmistakeable drone of a helicopter.

"Oh, shit," Rain whispers. Valentine glances at her face, then sprints upstairs. Rain grabs a shotgun from the wall, plus some ammo, and follows.

The farm is gone, blown to dust. Vasquez is kneeling over a man's body, shaking him. Another corpse is half-draped over the lip of the roof, yet Rain's attention goes right to the sky. Two helicopters hover above them. Missiles loaded. Operatives perched in the sides, ready to jump.

This isn't an extraction. It's an extermination.

"Run!" she yells. "They've won! Run!"

Dietrich, to his credit, only takes a second before he starts shoving people towards the bridge.

"Not there!" Rain shouts. A missile hits it as a woman is halfway across and blows her to shrapnel. "Down the stairs!"

Valentine grabs a woman, but she drops to the ground only a second later, skull shattered by armour-piercing rounds. This is a mess.

Rain sees a rope, tied to an outpost at the edge of the building. It's a risk, but there's another way out. She lunges across the space, pulls Vasquez back just as bullets hit the space she was, and shoves her down the stairs. Vasquez hits the steps running. Then there's just her, Valentine, Dietrich, and two others. Both look like ex-S.T.A.R.s, pinned down behind a solid chunk of metal. One of the helicopters gets close enough and the first two operatives leap to the roof.

"Get down there!" Valentine barks at Dietrich, pointing to the stairs. He hesitates, obviously wondering about the last two members of his team. "We'll get them, just go!"

Two down, three to go.

Rain pulls a knife free as the third operative lands and it spins hilt-deep into his neck with one cock of the wrist. She's pulling the other free, sprinting forwards to draw attention, knowing even as she does so that the first man trapped under fire is making a run for it. The second knife slams into the operative's chest and she doesn't stop moving, pulling it free to jump at the last man even as two more leap down. The blade finds a home in his heart and rounds of fire slam into his body, missing Rain by inches.

The second man is running for the stairs now, but the second helicopter has pulled back and is aiming at the building.

"Wait!" she hears Valentine yell. The entire building shudders as the missile hits it. Rain vaults over the first operative, shoots the first point-blank with the pistol, spins to get the second. Then the woman's there, face streaked with blood, yelling at her until she understands. They're safe, and she's pointing at the rope that dangles over the side. Rain understands.

"Go!" she roars. "I'll be right behind you!"

Valentine turns and runs for it. Rain drops the pistol, pulls the rifle from over her back, and aims at the copter.

The pilot doesn't seem to realise what's going on when the bullets hit him in the head and chest, sending the whole machine whirring forward as he slumps over the controls.

Rain runs.

She grabs hold of the rope, has a firm handle on it when the helicopter smashes into the building. The impact shakes through her bones, and the reverberations send her sliding down until she tightens her grip, rope burn scalding through her skin. Then she has to loosen her grip to get to the floor, and fuck it's a long way down when she glances. If she drops, she won't survive. So she holds on, shaking and shaking as the block reverberates.

Finally it subsides. The helicopter must have smashed through one side, leaving the main structure intact. A glancing blow.

She shimmies down the rope to the floor until she thinks she can let go, and Valentine is there steadying her. Dietrich is in the Jeep beside them, and they jump in. Vasquez is in front, so Rain and Valentine shove in the back with a dark-haired man.

"Crowe," he says, extending a hand. Rain doesn't take it.

"Wasn't there another man with you?" she asks.

"Apone didn't make it," he says.

"Can we save the chitchat for later?" growls Vasquez, as Dietrich takes a hard right and they're all thrown violently to one side.

"Not really," Crowe snaps. "How did they find us? What problems do Umbrella have with survivors?"

Valentine glances at Rain. She sighs, begins pressing gently over her skin.

"I thought I'd got all of them," she mutters. Her hands leave faint bloodstains, and she's confused for a minute until she remembers the rope burn. Sure enough, her palms are raw and red.

"Must've missed one," Valentine says.

"No shit." She leans forward, probes her spine. About halfway down, next to her vertebrae, there's a familiar hard lump. "It's in my back."

"I'll get it when we stop," the woman promises.

"Get what?" Crowe asks.

"Tracker," Rain says. The man throws up his hands.

"You fucking kidding me? It's your fault Apone's dead?"

"Stop and I'll get out," Rain says. Dietrich's hands tighten on the steering wheel. "But I know someone who can stop this. That's why Umbrella want me, because I can find her. And she's going to burn them to the ground."

They look at her. They look at each other. But they don't stop the car.

 

"That was a shitshow," Rain says quietly. Her back is throbbing, the tracker having been dug out. Next to her, Valentine snorts.

"You're not very good at making friends."

"Neither are you," she tosses back. Valentine lays down on the sand. They drove for the rest of the day and half the night, until Dietrich called a halt. Now him, Crowe, and Vasquez are sleeping a few metres away, the emergency supplies from the Jeep having been unpacked, assessed, and replaced. 

"Yeah, well." Valentine sighs. Since meeting these people a few hours ago, Rain has led Umbrella to their location, crashed a helicopter into their home, and killed more than half their friends. No wonder One said she was difficult. 

"We could always just leave them."

"No." 

"Look, you know I'm not safe to be around. So either they leave us, or I do."

"You sound like her." Valentine's eyes have softened. Rain looks away. "But you know I can't just leave them."

"I know," she says. "I know. We can meet up in a week?"

"Where?"

"Under the bridge that used to lead out Raccoon City. It's protected and hidden, and no Umbrella operative is going to think you'd do something that stupid."

Valentine nods, and Rain stands up. She walks silently to the Jeep and pulls open a door, then clambers inside and retrieves some spare ammo rounds. She's got the knives in her boots and the pistol at the back of her jeans as well as the rifle over her back. She considers a moment, then grabs a small sports bag from under the footwell and chucks in the spare rounds, a few water bottles, and some tins. It'll keep her going a few days. Then she grabs a roll of bandages and puts that in too, for when the wounds on her arm and back need re-dressing.

"Here." Valentine is standing by the door, holding two blades. They're similar to the ones she had before Isaacs captured her, her trusty hunting knives. She grins.

"Thank you."

"Figured you'd need them. You better get out of here before they wake up."

Rain spares a rare smile for Valentine. Then she takes the knives, straps them to her belt, and stalks away from the dark campsite.

She is going to find Alice. Now there's nothing in her way. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> gearing up for the end now - this one kind of sets up the next chapter


	8. Chapter 8

Rain has been nearing Raccoon City for the last few hours, and already she's pissed off.

Being pissed off isn't exactly an uncommon experience for her, nor is slaughtering her way through groups of undead. But when it seems like every single monster in the closest five kilometres has decided to stand in her way, it got a bit tiring. That is why she's opted for the motorbike. The way she got the motorbike doesn't really bear thinking about, but it involved a lot of lying in wait for Umbrella and then a lot of screaming - from the operative, not her. It's his hand she now has pressed to the handlebars, her other gloved to guard against any risk of the bike electrocuting her. It was a lesson hard-learned the first time around.

Behind her, there's a slowly shuffling crowd of what must be at least fifty at this point. Give her a sniper rifle and a rooftop and she could probably take them down, but up close and crowded is when they're most deadly. Besides, getting in their way would slow her down.

The real reason Rain's in such a hurry is actually more about her sighting of three Umbrella helicopters than the undead. They had buzzed by overheard about two and a half hours ago, and she'd thrown herself off the bike in an effort to escape attention, sure they had come to kill her. Fortunately, it seemed their attention was elsewhere and they hadn't even slowed until they reached the centre of the crater at Raccoon City where they'd set down. She didn't have the faintest clue what they were doing, but their presence alone indicated something was going on at the Hive.

As she draws closer to Raccoon City, she can see the three circling biohazards more clearly. They could be clones of the one she'd killed. They were the first obstacle: reach the city centre without drawing their attention, since there was no way in hell she could take down three. But her presence alone would draw her second problem, the undead, to her, since they tended to close in unconsciously on the living, thereby alerting the biohazards.

But even if she did avoid both those problems, she still had to deal with the Hive.

 

Rain sneaks in. She lets her training take over, moving low automatically, freezing whenever one of the monsters swoop overhead, feeling acutely the lack of support, nobody to watch her six. It takes time moving so slow, checking behind her every few minutes.

“Fuck,” she whispers and presses close to the dirt and rubble as leathery wingbeats sound overhead.  As soon as they recede into the distance she’s up and sprinting to the next bit of cover. Its roof is crumbling away to reveal the fire-blackened steel of its bones. Maybe once it was a house, but the first storey was razed, sparing only the ground floor. And because she’s so preoccupied with scanning for any creatures that could have seen her desperate sprint she almost doesn’t hear the soft shuffling behind her.

She whirls, knives flashing silver in her hands, one embedding itself in the forehead of the undead that had been about to bite down. Three steps to the next, the blade in-out of its eye and a duck under the clumsy grab of the third, then the thrust into the back of its skull that downs it. A glance reveals a shaft of dusty sunlight shining through a huge crack in the wall, and it’s from this the undead are spilling through. She doesn’t dare pull the guns, knows they will make too much noise and attract too much attention. Instead Rain runs, ducking low to retrieve the first knife.

She’s tempted to go back, retrace her steps, but she’s too deep into the city now. The only way out is through and she sprints with reckless speed, making too much noise. The infected begin to emerge all around her. She needs cover.

One of the biohazards is circling around, breaking off from its slow patrol of the crater to investigate the disturbance. Rain piles on speed until she’s at breaking point, aiming for a block of flats. She can see only one entrance and exit and it still has a heavy metal door attached. It swings loosely on its hinges but when Rain slams it into place behind her it holds. Holds as she slides the lock into place. Holds as the undead press up against it in ever-greater numbers. Rain presses her back against it and sighs in relief.

Then she sees it. A lever on the wall. A bloody handprint flaking off the handle. And underneath that, an Umbrella logo.

Rain knows this place. She walked out of it a few months ago, dazed and confused, navigating through the abandoned facility. That lever leads to the facility she was kept in, drugged and unconscious, for ten years.

She doesn’t think about it as she pulls the lever and the wooden floor of the reception slides back to reveal shining white stairs and descends carefully, her hands straying to her knives every other second. The stairs open up into a corridor, and the corridor becomes a maze, but she knows where what she wants is. It’s like a map has been implanted into her brain.

 _This is not my knowledge,_ she thinks.

 _This was implanted in my head,_ she thinks.

 _This is a trap,_ she thinks.

And then there is sound. Not the shuffling stumble of the infected, or the light step of a human. The footfalls are heavy and loud and echoing. Rain palms her knives as her enemy lumbers into view.

It must be seven feet, its head brushing the ceiling. The skin over its body looks burnt and leathery, layered with rags. Two curling horns sprout from its forehead over two gleaming black eyes. At least it’s humanoid in shape, although the muscled, blackened arms sprouting curved claws from the knuckles suggest genetic fusion.

Rain goes for the easy target and lashes out with one knife, thrusting for its torso, while the other spins for an eye. Quicker than thought the monster responds, right hand catching the knife in mid-flight. The other embeds itself only a few inches into the skin, barely a graze, before it’s ripped out and thrown at Rain’s head. She’s ducking already, anticipating the counter-blow which passes easily over her head.

The monster roars and slashes low-high-low with its claws, beating her back, pressing and pressing until she gains enough time to go for her pistols. Two shots aimed at its eyes and its arms go up in instinctive defence, so Rain slides through its legs and sprints for the knife behind it. She snatches it up and keeps on running, altering her mental route slightly.

It obviously hadn’t expected her to pick flight over fight, and she has an easy twenty metres on it before it picks up pace. Its feet hit the floor louder and louder, quicker and quicker and she feels claws rip through her back, spilling new lines of white-hot pain.

“Fuckfuckfuck,” she hisses and piles on speed until she’s gasping for air and her legs feel leaden. It’s less than two minutes to her destination. Two minutes. Two minutes. Two minutes. She passes bodies decaying on the floor and can’t tell whether they were human or the undead. One minute left and the footsteps behind her are thudding ever louder and closer. Thirty seconds and hot breath blows on her neck. Twenty seconds and it’s reaching out again. Ten seconds and the claws catch, shred, rip.

Rain catches a doorframe and swings inside, feeling the talons slice free. And she’s confronted by a roomful of weapons.

The armoury hadn’t been her original destination. But it would certainly do for now.

The monster roars as it skids to a stop outside and turns to face her. Something approximating a smile forms on its ripped mouth as it realises she’s trapped. One step after another, it backs her into the corner, prowling with the confidence of an apex predator facing down prey.

“This bitch has claws too,” Rain whispers when it reaches two feet away from her. The small head tilts. And then she brings up the weapon she had grabbed in the second it took for the mutation to stop and shoots it in the chest.

It’s a fancy bit of new tech Umbrella had been trialling when Rain was still an active operative. An unholy combination of a grenade launcher and shotgun, it shot a whole new type of bullet technology, using corrosive materials to carve a large chunk out of its unfortunate target.

The monster goes sprawling, the hole in its centre so clean Rain can see floor through the other side of it. She grins.

“Fuck you,” she says with a cocky smirk and a middle finger. That was barely a fight. The bodies of the undead she killed the last time she visited still lay around in various states of decomposition, and the same weapons are still on the wall. It seems unchanged, but Rain knows better. The presence of a biohazard says Umbrella have been back, baiting their trap to kill any victims that wandered in. She spits on the corpse and grabs the same weapons as last time: twin pistols, another pair of knives, a rifle slung over her back and the reassuring weight of a H&K MP5K in her hands. Just like old times. Spare ammo clips in her boots, a belt over her shoulder, and she’s good to go.

Stepping out, blood trailing down her wounded back, Rain takes less than thirty seconds to find her original destination. It’s a control room. Overturned monitors litter the space like corpses. She rights them one by one and checks the cameras. There’s years of footage on them and she scrolls through. There she is only months ago, the first painful wake up and the walk through the facility. Forward again to only a few hours before she entered this time and she hits gold. Umbrella technicians. She follows them through the cameras. There are five doctors in white scrubs flanked by a ring of black-armoured operatives moving in a tight pack, gunning down any and all undead. They enter one of the labs and the scientists spread out while the guards take up positions at the door.

They work for a few minutes, then something seems to unite them again. Four of five scientists retreat to the guards. The fifth, however, steps to a huge, upright cryotube in the corner and types in a series of codes. The glass is frosted, but Rain can just make out a smear of red. Then the front swings open.

She recognises what steps out. Its corpse is lying in the armoury.

The fight is brief and bloody, round after round emptied into the creature. Of course, nothing stops it. Within two minutes there is one operative left, cowering in the door. But Rain recognises the weapon he’s carrying. It’s the exact one she used to kill it.

The round rips into and through it. It drops. The operative sighs in relief, approaching its corpse and kicking at one limp arm, before he turns away and pressing one finger to his ear to activate his comm.

What happens next is so unbelievable, so horrifying Rain wants to speed through it. The monster rises from the floor on silent feet and rips the gun away from the man, kills him, and looks into the camera. Its mouth twists down and it smashes it.

 It was dead. Definitely, unmistakeably dead. Just as dead as when she…

Footsteps, heavy and slow, sound outside. Rain turns slowly.

God, she’s tired. Tired of the fighting and the running and the killing. So much killing. Killing mutations and monsters and people, and she’s tempted to just lay down and die. Let it rip out her heart, who cares? Not her.

_Alice might._

Rain grits her teeth. Everything she’s done, she’s done for her. In that moment she feels the ghost of lips over hers, a whisper in her ear.

_“You stay alive, and I’ll try to do the same.”_

Fine. She brings the MP5K up, practically spitting its face, in the face of death, and it takes the challenge.

Her back is bleeding again and the skin is stretched every time she ducks under a blow or jumps back. The creature advances, retreats, claws ripping across her throat as Rain bends back and unleashes a round on its legs. It crumples to one knee but the damage is superficial, easily fixed. Flesh knits back together and it rises to run at her. Rain yells in rage and frustration at its strength.

_Boom._

Well, it’s not a boom exactly, but a deep, continuous noise. The ceiling rattles and shakes and showers loose fragments on them both. She dodges one last chunk of rock and realises the monster has not moved. In its eyes, an Umbrella signal flashes red.

Are they watching her? She lunges forward, intending to shoot out its eyes while it so helpfully stood still, and one massive hand comes up to protect itself. The bullets embed in its skin yet no attempt at a counter-attack is made.

Rain pauses. The signal suggests Umbrella is feeding it information. Instructions on how to kill her, maybe.

The mutation turns away from her and walks away. Each footstep is slow and thunderous. She blinks, confused, and sprays its retreating back with gunfire. It makes no wince or flinch or grunt to show it notices.

“Where the fuck are you going?” she screams after it. That, too, provokes no reaction. Rain glances around the room, looking for something to throw. Movement on an upright monitor catches her eye.

She looks between the monster’s retreating form and the screen for a moment before curiosity takes over and she turns to the monitor.

This is at least the third curveball thrown her way today and she’s getting pretty sick of it.

An armoured Umbrella tank rolls down one of the city’s main streets. Its lights blaze a path and illuminate the undead emerging from the roads ahead. Some it rolls over. Some are clipped by the huge wheels and thrown down in a whirl of blood and shredding flesh. However, most join the horde trailing behind it. Hundreds, thousands, of the infected. Rain switches to another camera and sees her new friend emerging from a house to join the horde. No, not the horde. The army. This is an army.

There is only one person who can command this kind of attention. Rain has no doubt all she needs to do is follow them. They will lead her right to the Hive. Smirking, Rain flicks through the footage until she sees something that makes her stop smiling.

There is bait being dragged behind the tank, kicking at the infected that get too close. Human bait. She recognises the close-shaven black hair and taut muscles. It’s Crowe, one of the survivors of Rain’s brief visit to his makeshift compound. And if Crowe is here, then Valentine must be as well.

There’s one way to tell. Valentine said she’d meet her today under the bridge. Rain had originally decided to skip it to avoid any overenthusiastic S.T.A.R.S. trying to tag along, but she can’t now.

Judging by the steady speed of the tank, they would be at the Hive within the hour. She has two choices. The first: meet up with Valentine if she’s still free. If she’s not, Rain will have wasted any chance of intercepting them at the Hive. If she is, she’ll have some support chasing them. But will support be enough? There will still be only two or three of them and one person has much less chance of being spotted than a group.

What it all boils down to is who Rain is most desperate to save. See if Valentine is alive and save Crowe, or beat the tank to the crater and warn Alice?

Like there was ever any choice.

She’s come this far for one person alone.

 

Rain rides hard and fast, burning rubber north. It is barely twenty minutes before she sees the cavernous black crater, scorched and raw. She steps right up to its lip, unafraid.

She looks back only once at the cloud of dust in the distance before she begins the start of her descent to the Hive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> long one this time, I know, :)


	9. Chapter 9

Rain crouches on a dusty black ledge less than ten metres from the bottom of the crater, and listens.

In the distance there are faint barks and howls, but closer, much closer, paws tread a path to her. There must be five of them by now, able to scent her but not see her. She’s thankful she heard them coming. If she had dropped down the final distance then they would have been on her in seconds and undoubtedly would have torn her to shreds. She’s come too far for such a clumsy mistake to be her undoing. She risks moving a few inches closer and is immediately confronted with a storm of yowling and yapping, howling to the others.

Rain is fairly sure by now of what they are. Project Alice was not the only T-virus mutation they had attempted to deploy. Sure, the majority of animals responded badly to the virus, but dogs had taken to it with alarming ease and ferocity. Coupled with a savage loyalty, they were formidable opponents.

It was only one step up from there to infect wolves.

Below her the pack bayed for her blood. They were not true wolves anymore, twisted and tireless as they were, yet the Severus version of the virus had proved useful indeed. She stood up, tilting her MP5K down into an open mouth. The bullet rips through its jaw and throat and cleanly through the other side, embedding deep into the earth. The monster doesn’t even pause.

Bullets won’t stop them. Her next idea will risk her life.

Reaching into her pocket, she draws out a compact grenade and hooks her finger through the pin to hold it into place for now. The ledge offers very little in the way of protection and it is very likely shrapnel will hit her – or worse, will send a section of the wall crumbling and allow any surviving monsters an easy way up to her. That would be an agonising death.

 _Better than sitting here and waiting for the tank to catch me,_ she thinks. Because, really, what has she actually got left to lose?

She pulls the pin in one smooth move and tosses the grenade down below her, curling up as close to the wall as she can get.

The explosion vibrates through the ground, through the wall, through her very bones. Black dust and small chunks of rock drop both onto her and from beneath her feet, but when she uncurls and crawls forward and drops down, there are only still bodies.

Ears echoing from the noise, she stumbles away. The centre must be where the Hive is. Her exhausted legs pick up speed quickly, spurred by the sound of barks and roars. Overhead, swirling black clouds hide her from the winged monsters that circle endlessly.  Her ears are clearing second by second and she can already hear the noises getting closer. She won't last long. Murky puddles splash against her boots and rocks go rolling, throwing up small puffs of dust.

A huge black shape lunges from the shadows, reflected light sparking from outstretched claws, and Rain just dodges the teeth aimed at her throat. The impact knocks all breath from her lungs and they go rolling across the hard ground, the wolf slashing at her face. Her arms fly open and a claw catches her, digs in and rips all the way down from wrist to elbow. She grits her teeth against the pain flashing sharp and brings her knee up, hitting the monster in the stomach as she reaches for the knife by her ankle. She pulls it free and stabs upwards, aiming for something vital. Blood gushes out and skin splits underneath coarse fur, but the attack doesn't falter. She brings both feet up, kicks out, rolls away and slides sideways just as the animal lands where she was, long teeth scraping at air.

Rain moves in so fast it doesn't see her coming. The knife goes into its hind leg right where it joins its torso. With a deft movement, she slices its leg clean off.

Its howl of fury when it topples sideways is horrible. Teeth snapping, it attempts to drag itself to her with its front legs like some monstrous snail, leaving a trail of blood behind it. Rain steps on its neck to keep it still and drives the blade in up to her knuckles, then again and again until it finally stops moving.

She takes a step back and stares at the partially-dismembered corpse for a moment before pain kicks in. She studies her arm. The wound isn't too deep, but it's long and the claw caught underneath her skin, leaving a huge flap of skin loose. There's not really much that can be done about that, so she just binds it with a strip of fabric from the bottom of her pants, tucking the edges in to prevent loose ends.

The one brief altercation has cost her. The barks and growls are closer than ever now. Rain bites her lip, glances around.

There. A yawning mouth, blacker than the pits of hell. She runs as the pack close in on her location, until she can hear their paws thudding on the ground. She runs until the sounds fade into silence, until she turns and sees maybe forty, fifty pairs of eyes narrowed on her. They pace impatiently, pawing the ground, growling and snarling, but don't venture any further. This must be the one place they are not allowed into.

Rain steps inside carefully. The halls are black and grey, thick with the dust from the dark rocks outside. Her shaking breaths are the only sound echoing off the walls for a moment.

Then there is a small mechanical  _click_ and a red hologram activates, blooming into a young girl's face. 

"Hello, Rain," she says.

"The Red Queen," Rain says. "I thought we had destroyed you."

"Energy is never destroyed," the girl says. "It just changes forms."

"Wanna bet, bitch?" Rain hisses with a dark smile, stepping forwards.

"You cannot hurt me. Besides, your petty vengeance counts for nothing here. You are the final piece in Isaacs' game. Do you understand, Rain? Alice is here, deep inside. Wesker has sealed off the lower levels from me, but I can see her heat signature. She is safe. You are not. Isaacs' clones are coming for him, whether or not they know it."

"His clones?" 

"The true Isaacs in in cryosleep, waiting out the apocalypse. What you have encountered so far are of the same make of you. However, two of these clones are headed directly for the Hive, one from the north and one from the south. " The Red Queen looked into Rain's eyes. "I need you to help me."

 

The pulsing device in Rain's hand holds the Severus mutations at bay. They yap and yowl, prowling a few metres away. The Red Queen had said that they would follow her until either she left their territory or the device failed and they killed her. Rain isn't expecting to leave their territory.

She's been running maybe fifteen minutes, interrupted by the occasional short climb. Her new guide points out the best handholds and talks to her while she moves, preparing her for what she might face.

"He could be heavily mutated, but will undoubtedly appear normal to you until you are within striking range. Certainly he will have weapons - either biological or technical - that far exceed anything you possess, and will stop at nothing to obliterate you. You will be at a disadvantage if you choose to fight him on the tank roof and risk giving him a view of the other clone -"

"Well, it's either that or we both get torn apart by the undead," Rain snaps through gritted teeth. This temporary alliance doesn't mean she has to stop hating the bitch.

"Don't forget that although Alice is his ultimate aim, he will become enraged if there is even the faintest suggestion of you winning this fight against him. He will settle for mutually assured self-destruction if he believes you have a genuine chance of killing him." The Red Queen talks on, but Rain has stopped listening. The cloud of dust that has been growing steadily larger over the past few minutes has resolved itself into the definite shape of a tank, and now she can distinguish individual figures stumbling behind it.

The tank slows as the man standing atop it sees Rain.

"Hey, Isaacs!" she yells. The undead surge forwards and Rain takes her chance, sprinting for the front of the vehicle. A hand on one side, fingers curled around a gun turret, and she hoists herself up. Isaacs’ face is fixed in an inhuman snarl of frustration.

“Who are you?” he snaps, drawing a pistol. “What do you think you’re doing?”

The knife flies too fast for Isaacs to dodge it. It knocks the gun out his hand and he jerks away, blood dripping from his sliced palm down the sides of the tank. The undead swarming around them go wild, pushing in from all sides as they attempt to grasp a handhold. She hears a high-pitched shriek and belatedly realises it’s Crowe, the S.T.A.R.S member Isaacs had towed behind them as bait. Too late to save him now.

“My name is Rain,” she says, and draws her hunting knives.

Isaacs is fast. He’s unarmed but it doesn’t deter him from trying to slip under her guard, coming into range of the slicing blades.

“Duck,” the Red Queen says, and Rain drops immediately, just in time to see the high kick flying over her head. She wouldn’t have been able to dodge that without the AI’s help. Isaacs renews his attack with more anger, forcing her onto the defensive, lashing out with a punch that finally lands. She goes flying backwards and the Red Queen is in her head telling to get up almost before she’s landed.

That isn’t human strength, she thinks dazedly. She rolls onto her side to grab the knife that she dropped when she landed and a boot comes down on her wrist. She screams in pain and brings the other blade over in an arc, driving deep into Isaacs’ calf. His shout of rage mixes with hers as she sees the flash of silver headed for her face.

Her knife comes up in time to stop the point driving through her eye, but it doesn’t stop the blow entirely. His arm slips and skids and she feels the cold tip rip through her face from cheek to jaw, cutting sideways across her nose. She kicks out and makes contact somewhere below his belt, hard enough to push him back.

On her feet again, blood sliding red and slick into her mouth, the Red Queen in her ear. Drop, she says. Lunge, back up, try again. Kick and punch, holding the knife sideways like an extension of her hand and it catches on his arm.

They both back up, circling like wounded tigers, pacing the length of their cage. The undead jostle below them.

“Who are you?” Isaacs hisses.

“I told you,” she says, still circling, watching the knife in his hand. “I’m Rain Ocampo.”

“You’re one of the clones,” he says.

Rain looks him straight in the eyes.

“So are you.”

The Red Queen’s talking to her again, but she can’t hear it over her throbbing heartbeat, blood pounding in her ears. Isaacs' jaw has dropped, and she sees the shock, and she uses it.

Like One said. Use any gap you can find.

She lunges and he moves back too slow to stop her. The knife doesn't punch straight through his heart though, instead into his stomach. It doesn't matter. The damage is done. 

"You're lying!" he screams. One hand is over his wound, and Rain wonders for a moment if she hit intestine. It looks too high. 

"That was foolish," the Red Queen says quietly. Isaacs looks wild with rage, waving the knife as he advances on her, Rain backing up and up until one foot slips on the slope of the tank's side. Isaacs seizes his chance, lashing out with the knife. She rolls to one side and turns to see his face frozen in a mask of anger.

"Move," the Red Queen instructs. Rain rolls again without questioning her, coming up on her feet this time, seeing a tentacle shoot past her, ending in a sharp-toothed gaping mouth. Her enemy is gurgling a smile, drooling blood. She sees his hand has moved away from his stomach and in a moment sees pale flesh through the rags he wears. 

"You have to end this now," the Red Queen tells her calmly. "The more time passes, the more he will discover of his mutations."

So Rain sees when he opens his mouth and hooked tentacles push their way out, waving grotesquely. 

When the idea hits her, she can hardly believe that it will work on him. But time has run out and if she wants to survive this, and save Alice, she will have to risk it.

She drops the knife and takes a step backwards, feigning shock. "How - how did you do that? Are you - what are you?" She knows he will hear the fear in her voice. And she's right. He paces to her, tentacles retracting just enough for him to talk. 

"You know, Rain, I've always-"

He doesn't see her draw the knife from where she had stashed it inside her sleeve. A stiletto knife, sheath strapped to her skin, kept for emergencies. She drives it deep into his neck with one quick movement and the tentacles retreat entirely. He drops spasming to the tank roof, fingers curling and uncurling. Rain crouches by him.

"This is for Alice," she tells him, and pulls the knife out. Blood splashes onto her boots, streaming down the sides of the tank. 

"You should be careful," the Red Queen warns. "He still possesses extraordinary regenerative abilities."

"What, no well done?" Rain slices his head clean off and tosses it to the mob below. His limbs follow, one by one, and then she heaves what remains of his torso over the side to be devoured. It takes a few minutes and her hands are soaked with blood when she finally stands up and surveys the scene. There's nothing except a very large bloodstain to indicate Isaacs' existence. "Will that be enough to save Alice?"

"I hope so," the girl replies. "Soon the two remaining Isaacs will collide, and Alice will be in the middle."

"What can I do?" 

"Attend to your wounds. I will return shortly. There is a matter I must give my full focus."

"Bitch," Rain says, a moment too late. The Red Queen is gone and all that remains is her throbbing, smarting face and a badly bruised wrist. She opens the tank hatch and drops inside, unsurprised to find it pristine apart from two bodies - the crew, presumably. She finds a mirror hanging from the wall and examines herself.

It looks awful. Blood is smeared across most of her face, so she tends to that first, tearing strips off the dead men's shirts and soaking them with the bottled water on the side. Once that's cleared she examines the actual wound. It's deep, sure, but it missed her eye. That's the first blessing. The second is that although it will scar, it probably won't be as bad as some other injuries she's gotten the last few months. A bruise is blooming where Isaacs punched her, spreading blue over her cheekbone. Her wrist probably has a hairline fracture, but nothing serious. If it comes to it, she can still hold a weapon, and she's got the other hand anyway. 

That sorted, Rain climbs back out. All other concerns and fears come secondary to what Alice is doing right now. 

This feels more dangerous than other fights, like there's more at stake. Things have come full circle. They are back at the Hive, and she's helpless again. Helpless to save them. 

That's not true, she tells herself. She looks down at the crowds massing around the tank. The undead are only a few people deep at the front, most of them having congregated to where she tossed Isaacs' remains. Enough to jump over, maybe.

Rain takes a few steps backwards. Then she sprints right to the edge and leaps.

She hits one of the undead near the back, knocks it flying, scrambles up and is running. She's done so much running to Alice, but now on the final stretch she feels the burn from her abused body. The lack of sleep, her clawed arm, her bleeding face, her broken wrist, and an ankle that turned sideways when she landed, lending every step a slight limp. She can feel it all, and behind her the shuffling of hundreds of monsters. She is leading them to the final battleground. 

Three hundred metres to the Hive entrance, maybe. Gasping with every breath, Isaacs' voice echoing in her ears.

" _We can terminate her at any time."_

Alice.

_"You stay alive and I'll try to do the same."_

Valentine.

" _You're_ Rain. _Her Rain."_

Two hundred metres when she feels a withered hand grasp her shoulder, jerk her back, and teeth dig in. Rain screams, kicks back, and the teeth come loose along with a chunk of flesh from her shoulder.

Alice.

_"Not that much further now."_

All the ghosts from the Hive, clustered around her. She could swear they were with her, pushing her on. 

One's half-smile. Kaplan's smirk. Matt's steady grin. JD, laughing and alive. The pain of phantom bites, bites that had happened yet, bites that tore pieces off her original. From her hand and arm and neck. 

Another clawing hand, then another, and teeth scraping over her back as she puts on an extra burst of speed. 

One hundred metres. She sees it then - Alice and Isaacs. Two Isaacs. 

She sees it all.

She can't stop it.

Can't stop Alice from dropping the vial on the rocky earth. The undead in front of her - where did they come from? Did one of the Isaacs bring them? - collapsing, wave after wave of them falling still and silent and dead.

And then Alice falls. And Rain is screaming, screaming as another mouth tears into her neck and lets go as a bitter wind hits them. She doesn't look as she reaches Alice, dropping to her knees, her blood dripping on Alice, blood from her face and her neck and her shoulder and arm, blood that bathes them both in a bitter smell of rust. She doesn't care what happens to the horde behind them as she cradles Alice in her arms, sobbing at last. All the pain and loneliness and grief for her, for them, for the world, pours out. Tears clear the dirt from her face. 

The T-virus creeps through her blood. Rain feels it burning and curls up on the ground, Alice in her arms. She has no strength left to resist it, and she would not even if she could. Soon, it will be all that binds them together.

Rain presses a last kiss to Alice's lips and closes her eyes. 

 

 

 

 


End file.
